it.i THE KANTIAN CRITICISM 357 



he bound them together: such was the hypothesis of Leib- 

 niz and of Spinoza. But it is not necessary to go so far, 

 and, for the effect we have here to obtain, the human 

 intellect is enough : such is precisely the Kantian solution. 

 Between the dogmatism of a Spinoza or a Leibniz and the 

 criticism of Kant there is just the same distance as between 

 "it may be maintained that — " and "it suffices that — ." 

 Kant stops this dogmatism on the incline that was making 

 it slip too far toward the Greek metaphysics; he reduces 

 to the strict minimum the hypothesis which is necessary 

 in order to suppose the physics of Galileo indefinitely ex- 

 tensible. True, when he speaks of the human intellect, he 

 means neither yours nor mine: the unity of nature comes 

 indeed from the human understanding that unifies, but 

 the unifying function that operates here is impersonal. 

 It imparts itself to our individual consciousnesses, but it 

 transcends them. It is much less than a substantial God; 

 it is, however, a little more than the isolated work of a man 

 or even than the collective work of humanity. It does not 

 exactly lie within man; rather, man lies within it, as in 

 an atmosphere of intellectuality which his consciousness 

 breathes. It is, if we will, a formal God, something that 

 in Kant is not yet divine, but which tends to become so. 

 It became so, indeed, with Fichte. With Kant, however, 

 its principal role was to give to the whole of our science 

 a relative and human character, although of a humanity 

 already somewhat deified. From this point of view, the 

 criticism of Kant consisted chiefly in limiting the dog- 

 matism of his predecessors, accepting their conception 

 of science and reducing to a minimum the metaphysic 

 it implied. 



But it is otherwise with the Kantian distinction between 

 the matter of knowledge and its form. By regarding in- 

 telligence as pre-eminently a faculty of establishing re- 



