xxxiv PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION 



save only Spinoza and Leibnitz, continued to over- 

 look it; and just as Kant himself came to the 

 conviction that it must be disregarded, so far as 

 concerned any knowable objective, and consequently 

 felt obliged to declare that the objective charac- 

 ter of a cognition lay simply in its necessity} — a 

 doctrine which, for the next obvious move, forced 

 philosophy upon the awkward alternative of either 

 (i) admitting this "necessity" to be merely the 

 dominating proclivity of the isolated self, and so, 

 as Hume had contended, merely a subjective neces- 

 sity, or else (2) returning, though by the route of 

 an idealistic cosmology, essentially to the view of 

 Spinoza, translating the "necessity" into necessita- 

 tion, operated upon (and in) each self, as a mode 

 of the One Thinking Reality, by the all-inclusive 

 and all-pervasive Absolute Self. 



This latter branch of the alternative, Kant, as we 

 all know, deliberately rejected, because he so clearly 

 and correctly discerned its fatal inconsistency with 

 personal autonomy, and thence with moral responsi- 

 bility ; and he chose, rather, to refer our conscious- 

 ness of duty — that is, of devout obligation to other 

 minds as the only strict Ends — to our good-faith, 

 our pure fealty, toward a bare ideal. Consequently 



1 See the various forms of his " Deduction " of the categories, pas- 

 sim, as presented in the first and second editions of the Critique, and 

 in his Reflexions, edited by Benno Erdmann. 



