Kant distinguishes imagination wherein error may arise from 

 scientific knowledge. 



It was this position which enabled Kant to see so clearly the 

 fallacies of rational psychology, cosmology and theology. The 

 Ideas of Reason were claimed by current rationalism to give sure 

 and certain knowledge of the soul, the world and God. But Kant 

 saw that when such Ideas were made constitutive the rationalist 

 was misunderstanding the true purpose of the Ideas. True know- 

 ledge arises when the understanding, through its categories and 

 through space and time, gives a necessary connection to objects 

 presented in perception. But the Ideas of Reason are given to 

 us by reason, and there are no objects, corresponding to these, 

 presented in perception. If imaginations have no objective vali- 

 dity, neither have these Ideas. Therefore no such knowledge, as 

 the rationalists claim, is at all possible. In the transcendental 

 dialectic, Kant proceeds to show the inconsistencies, which neces- 

 sarily result when the Ideas of Reason are treated in any other way 

 than regulative. To make them constitutive, i.e. to suppose that 

 they give us knowledge of transcendent objects, is to misunderstand 

 their significance. We can never know objects corresponding to 

 the Ideas. We can have problematic concepts 1 only. Speaking of 

 one of the Ideas, that of God, Kant says what may equally well 

 be applied to the other Ideas, i.e. the Ideas of the world and of 

 the soul. "We misapprehend at once the true meaning of that 

 Idea, if we accept it as the assertion, or even as the hypothesis of 

 a real thing to which the ground of the systematical construction 

 of the world should be ascribed. What we ought to do is to leave 

 it entirely uncertain what that ground which escapes all our con- 

 cepts may be by itself, and to use the Idea only as a point of view 

 from which alone we may expand that unity which is as essential 

 to reason as beneficial to the understanding." 



Now, in this view of Kant in regard to knowledge and in his 

 conception of the function of the Ideas, we have a tremendous 

 step in advance. The placing of an artificial gulf between matter 

 and mind, thing and idea that metaphysical presupposition which 

 had dominated all of the earlier development in rationalism Kant 



1 Op. Cit. Cf. P. 275. 



2 Op. Cit. P. 547. 



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