82 DOGMATISM AND EVOLUTION 



There has recently become current a belief, that a very close 

 affinity to the present-day theory of pragmatism is to be found in 

 Kant s regulative ideas of reason. Leaving aside their signifi 

 cance for the moral life (which we shall discuss later, and which 

 is irrevelant to our immediate purpose), their significance for 

 theoretical reason depends solely on their function. They are 

 never realized in any experience; that is to say, no analysis of a 

 given experience can reveal them as verified in it. Yet they are 

 essential to thought; for it is through their use that given ex 

 periences become organized into the larger unity of experience 

 as a whole. Their kinship with pragmatism thus appears upon 

 their face. Kant seems to say of them what the pragmatist 

 would say of all conceptions that while they are never com 

 pletely satisfied by any application of them, yet they serve to 

 bring unity to our thought, and in this service, if in no other, 

 find their sanction. 



Striking as this similarity to pragmatism appears to be, a 

 closer examination of the Kantian doctrine will show, we believe, 

 that these regulative principles are neither more nor less closely 

 related to pragmatism than are the constitutive principles. In 

 the first place, while they are instrumental in the sense that their 

 significance depends wholly on their usefulness, they are indis 

 pensable instruments for the organization of thought. Conse 

 quently they are not, like the principles of pragmatism, subject 

 to correction. They bear none of the ear-marks of evolution. 

 They are constructions of reason itself, created once for all by 

 reason for its own ends, without reference to the experience to 

 which they must be applied, and thus serve but to emphasize the 

 dualism between reason and the existent. True, they are to be 

 assumed as mere as ifs; but their as if is not the as if of an 

 instrumental logic, for they are not provisional. They are never 

 to be replaced by more workable conceptions. In short they 

 bear the unmistakable stamp of dogmatic absolutism. In the 

 second place, Kant says of them that their function is merely 

 to arrange the results of experience, without at all affecting the 



