CONTENT AND VALIDITY OF THE CAUSAL LAW 357 



of a purely logical (analytisdi) relationship between cause and effect; 

 but, on the contrary, this presupposition was then for the first time 

 brought clearly before consciousness. It was necessary to take the 

 roundabout way through occasionalism and the preestablished 

 harmony, including the latter 's retreat to the omnipotence of God, 

 before it was possible to raise the question of the validity of the 

 presupposition that the connection between cause and effect is 

 analytic and rational. 



Among the leading thinkers of the period this problem was re- 

 cognized as the cardinal problem of contemporaneous philosophy. It 

 is further evidence how thoroughly established this problem must 

 have been among the more deeply conceived problems of the time 

 in the middle of the eighteenth century, that Hume and Kant were 

 forced to face it, led on, seemingly independently of each other, 

 and surely from quite different presuppositions and along entirely 

 different ways. The historical evolution of that which from the 

 beginning has seemed to philosophy the solving of her true problem 

 has come to pass in a way not essentially different from that of the 

 historical evolution in all other departments of human knowledge. 

 Thus, in the last third of the seventeenth century, Newton and 

 Leibnitz succeeded in setting forth the elements of the infinitesimal 

 calculus; and, in the fifth decade of the nineteenth century, Robert 

 Mayer, Helmholtz, and perhaps Joule, formulated the law of the 

 conservation of energy. In one essential respect Hume and Kant 

 are agreed in the solution of the new, and hence contemporaneously 

 misunderstood, problem. Both realized that the connection be- 

 tween the various causes and effects is not a rational analytic, but 

 an empirical synthetic one. However, the difference in their presup- 

 positions as well as method caused this common result to make its 

 appearance in very different light and surroundings. In Hume's 

 empiricism the connection between cause and effect appears as the 

 mere empirical result of association; whereas in Kant's rationalism 

 this general relation between cause and effect becomes the funda- 

 mental condition of all possible experience, and is, as a conse- 

 quence, independent of all experience. It rests, as a means of 

 connecting our ideas, upon an inborn uniformity of our thought. 



Thus the way was opened for a fundamental separation of the 

 inductive material scientific from the deductive mathematical 

 method. For Hume mathematics becomes the science of the rela- 

 tions of ideas, as opposed to the sciences of facts. For Kant philo- 

 sophical knowledge is the knowledge of the reason arising from 

 concepts, whereas the mathematical is that arising from the con- 

 struction of concepts. The former, therefore, studies the particular 

 only in the universal; the latter, the universal in the particular, 

 nay, rather in the individual. 



