Practical Reason published in 1788 and the Critique of the Faculty 

 of Judgment written in 1790. In 1766 Kant had published an 

 essay entitled On the Dreams of a Ghost-Seer, as illustrated by 

 the Dreams of Metaphysics, and in 1770 there had come from his 

 pen a Dissertation on the Form and Principles of the Sensible 

 and Intelligible World. These earlier writings foreshadowed, to 

 an extent, the teachings which the critiques embody, but it is in 

 these latter that there are to be found the views which constitute 

 Kant's importance in the history of philosophy. 



Reference has already been made to the conditions prevailing 

 in the realm of metaphysics towards the close of the eighteenth 

 century. Kant himself describes the situation in his Critique of 

 Pure Reason. He pictures metaphysics as a queen whose rule 

 has become dogmatic and despotic. Intestine wars, however, and 

 finally complete anarchy break out. Among the rebels are the 

 sceptics, who, like nomads, despise all settled culture of the land 

 and endeavour to prevent others from cultivating the ground 

 afresh. The result of this state of affairs is that "at present, 

 after everything has been tried, as they say, and tried in vain, 

 there reign in philosophy weariness and complete indifferentism". 1 

 Metaphysics, he says, has hitherto not been so fortunate as to 

 enter on the secure path of a science, and has been for that reason 

 "an arena, specially destined, it would seem, for those who wish 

 to exercise themselves in mock fights, and where no combatant has, 

 as yet, succeeded in gaining an inch of ground that he could call 

 permanently his own". 2 But such conditions are, Kant holds, 

 the result of wrong method and may be overcome. He has a firm 

 belief in the necessity for and the value of metaphysics, but it 

 must be a thoroughly scientific system of metaphysics, and his 

 critique is written as a necessary preparation for such a system. 

 Such a metaphysics will not be based upon assumptions accepted 

 without criticism, it will not be a dogmatic philosophy like that 

 which resulted from the rationalistic school. In a foot-note con- 

 tained in the preface to the first edition of his Critique of Pure 

 Reason, Kant says, "Our age is, in every sense of the word, the 

 age of criticism, and everything must submit to it. Religion, on 

 the strength of its sanctity, and law, on the strength of its majesty, 



1 Max Muller's Edn. P. XIX. 



2 Ibid. P. 692. 



95 



