346 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



37. 



The regula- 

 tive ideas. 



Thirdly, having distinguished the two worlds, the 

 intelligible and the sensible, the world of things in 

 themselves and the world of mere appearance, he 

 applied this distinction to the human mind itself, and 

 maintained that so far as our own self and nature are 

 concerned, we possess an entrance into the world of 

 the truly real. Following on the lines indicated already 

 in antiquity in the Ideology of Plato, he distinguished 

 the world of ideas from that of phenomena : for Kant, 

 however, ideas did not add anything to, they served only 

 to regulate, experience. Foremost among these regu- 

 lative ideas stands out the self -regulating freedom of 

 the human Will. Indeed to safeguard this and the 

 moral law was a prompting idea in Kant's whole specu- 

 lation. Here we meet with our real nature, we gain a 

 glimpse of the existence of a universal mind. This 

 view has become a leading idea in many of the foremost 

 ethical systems since the time of Kant : we shall have 

 specially to consider it in a later chapter. So far as the 

 theory of knowledge is concerned, it had the important 

 influence of representing the human mind, not as merely 

 receptive or reflective, as was the case in the philo- 



for Kant's theory of Knowledge 

 recedes into the background com- 

 pared with that of a priori know- 

 ledge, was in the sequel pushed 

 into the foreground, and that the 

 main object of the ' Critique ' was 

 sought ... in this doctrine of 

 the 'Thing in itself.' And this 

 tendency was nursed by the fact that 

 the majority of the opponents was 

 composed of popular philosophers 

 and teachers whose interest con- 

 sisted primarily in disproving 

 Kant's refutation of a reasoned 



knowledge of ' Things in them- 

 selves.' As these objections re- 

 acted upon the followers of Kant, 

 these strove to clear the notion of 

 the 'Thing in itself ... of 

 its inherent contradictions. . . . 

 Accordingly the further develop- 

 ment of the critical philosophy 

 was mainly occupied with the dis- 

 integration of the notion of the 

 'Thing in itself" (Windelband, 

 'Geschichte der Neueren Philo- 

 sophic,' vol. ii. p. 201). 



