PRAGMATISM AND THE FORM OF THOUGHT 213 



only by his romantic successors, a self-centered recluse who 

 unrestrainedly piled speculation upon speculation, with the 

 slenderest basis of observed fact. The student of Kant knows 

 that his is not true, that among all philosophers ancient and 

 modern he is unsurpassed both for the breadth of scientific obser 

 vation which went to the forming of his views, and for the rigid 

 faithfulness with which he persisted in his observations and re 

 fused to indulge in gratuitous hypothesis. To adop.t a phrase 

 of the nature-poets, never was there a man who more invariably 

 wrote &quot;with his eye on the object.&quot; It is, indeed, in consequence of 

 impartial fidelity to matter-of-fact, that the volumes of his criti 

 cal philosophy are unusually full of naked paradox short of 

 formal contradiction, no consideration could lead him utterly 

 to exclude a well attested datum of experience. To this general 

 character of his thought, the doctrine of the categories assuredly 

 presents no exception. If we can no longer accept that doctrine 

 in its historical form, our dissent is due neither to faulty obser 

 vation in the premises nor to fallacy in the reasoning, but to a 

 radical transformation in the whole body of logical theory in 

 which the conception of categories has its place. To the array 

 of tolerably evident facts which the Kantian doctrine represents 

 a respectful interpretation must still be given. 



These facts may be briefly enumerated as follows. We are 

 in possession of a number of very general principles, to which 

 we attribute a truth that is not conceived as open to correction by 

 any experience; inasmuch as all the particulars of experience 

 are interpreted in accordance with these principles, and any ob 

 servation which apparently contradicted them would rather itself 

 be denied than cause a modification in these principles. These 

 principles are obviously synthetic, and thus open to formal ques 

 tioning, and no demonstration of their truth can be given; but 

 they constitute the most comprehensive organization of our expe 

 rience, and it is in this function that their validity consists. The 

 reality of phenomena in our experience has no further assignable 

 meaning than their conformity to these most general conditions 

 of experience. 



