THE CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY 69 



analytic propositions alone no new truths could be deduced. 

 They can, as Kant remarks, serve only "to form the chain of the 

 method, and not as principles." Furthermore, not only did he 

 recognize that metaphysics and natural science contained syn- 

 thetic principles, but he was equally convinced that geometry 

 and even arithmetic were based upon such principles. Now the 

 mathematical sciences were the only ones to which Hume had 

 allowed demonstrative certainty, as being based upon the direct 

 comparison of ideas all judgments involving the notion of cause 

 being only of various degrees of probability or 'moral' certainty. 

 But Kant found that Hume's criticism of the causal relation 

 turned upon its synthetic character; so that, although Hume 

 himself had never formulated the distinction between analytic 

 and synthetic judgments and, indeed, the distinction is wholly 

 foreign to his thought his criticism needed only to be generalized 

 in order to apply with equal cogency to the principles of mathe- 

 matics. 1 It was in this way that Kant's reading of Hume re- 

 acted so sharply upon his inbred rationalism. It brought into 

 relief the fundamental difficulty of rationalism and empiricism 

 alike: What warrant can exist for universal relations between 

 terms essentially disparate? 



It was, then, with a clear recognition of this difficulty, that 

 Kant was led to formulate the problem, How are synthetic judg- 

 ments a priori possible? And yet, despite this insight, he failed 

 to realize that a solution of the problem must involve a trans- 

 formation of the whole scheme of rationalistic logic. His pur- 

 pose was not to destroy but to fulfill rationalism . 



The solution which Kant believed himself to have discovered 

 lies in the fact, that a priori principles are the indispensable con- 

 ditions of the unity of experience. They are a priori, i. e., 

 immediately certain and logically independent of all other knowl- 



*As an indication of Kant's rationalistic bias, we may cite the remark (in the 

 Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, 2d ed.), that if Hume had thus general- 

 ized his criticism, his good sense must have forced him to reject both the logical 

 consequences of the criticism and the fundamental premises from which they were 

 drawn. 



