242 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



psychology, of which, e.g., at a later period, Maine de 

 Biran is a true representative, looks deeper and deeper 

 into the conscious self in order to find the essence of the 

 inner world. To Kant, on the other side, the latter 

 became as it were a mathematical or formal problem, and 

 this was so much more the case as Kant, in his analysis 

 of knowledge, directed his main attention to such know- 

 ledge as was laid down and crystallised in definite 

 judgments, i.e., in the sentences and words of language, 

 and in the theories of mathematics and natural 

 philosophy. 1 



III. and IV. : " The essence of 

 Scottish philosophy, as it appears 

 in Reid, may ... be described as a 

 vindication of perception, as per- 

 ception, in contradistinction to the 

 vague sensational idealism which 

 had ended in the disintegration of 

 knowledge. Sensation is the con- 

 dition of perception ; but so far 

 from the two terms being inter- 

 changeable, sensation, as a purely 

 subjective state, has no place in the 

 objective knowledge founded upon 

 it; that is to say, the philosophical 

 analysis of knowledge cannot pass 

 beyond the circle of percepts. It 

 is significant that the two points on 

 which Reid takes his stand should 

 be (1) the proclamation of a general 

 distinction between extension, as a 

 percept, and any feeling or series of 

 feelings as such ; and (2) the asser- 

 tion that the unit of knowledge is 

 an act of judgment. These are the 

 hinges, it is hardly necessary to add, 

 upon which Kant's philosophy also 

 turns in the ^Esthetic and the 

 Analytic" (3rd ed., p. 96). 



1 One of the principal subjects of 

 psychological as well as of logical 

 interest with which Kant was con- 

 cerned was the problem of the 

 certainty of knowledge, of the 

 necessary, not merely contingent, 



connection of ideas. Locke had re- 

 duced all certainty in the natural 

 sciences to more or less of pro- 

 bability, and Hume, to custom or 

 habit of thought. This did not 

 satisfy Kant, who, following in this 

 Descartes' line of reasoning, sought 

 for certainty in the constitution or 

 nature of the human mind. This 

 seemed to explain satisfactorily 

 mathematical certainty, but not the 

 certainty of knowledge referring to 

 external phenomena. To explain 

 this, the phenomena of the outer 

 world must, as it seemed, have some- 

 thing in common with the processes 

 of pure or logical thought. This 

 common feature was explained by 

 Kant in his special theory of the 

 ideality of time and space. With 

 his followers it took more and more 

 the form of the ultimate identity of 

 the subject (the thinking mind) and 

 the object, and led. through various 

 phases, ultimately to Hegel's con- 

 ception of thought as the nature 

 and life of the absolute mind, as 

 being the essence both of the ex- 

 ternal world of nature and history 

 and the internal world of the human 

 mind. It then became a task of 

 philosophy to develop a logic as 

 well as a psychology of the abstract 

 mind, or of thought in its most ab- 



