ceptive power (p. 84 and 122) were given, although without 

 adopting that phrase as essential to the doctrine. The argu- 

 ments thus adopted were stated by translating, almost 

 literally, Kant's own words ; yet the author was charged 

 by a Reviewer at the time, with explaining these doctrines 

 " in a manner incompatible with the clear views of Emanuel 

 Kant." It appeared to be assumed by the English admirers 

 of the Kantian philosophy, that Kant's views were true and 

 clear in Germany, but became untenable when adopted in 

 England. 



Stewart, in his criticism of Kant's doctrines, remarked 

 that, in asserting that the human mind possesses, in its own 

 ideas, an element of necessary and universal truth, not de- 

 rived from experience, Kant had been anticipated by Price, 

 by Cudworth, and even by Plato; to whose " Thesetetus" both 

 Price and Cudworth refer, as containing views similar to their 

 own. And undoubtedly this doctrine of ideas, as indispensable 

 sources of necessary truths, was promulgated and supported 

 by weighty arguments in the Thesetetus ; and has ever since 

 been held by many philosophers, in opposition to the con- 

 trary doctrine, also extensively held, that all truth is derived 

 from experience. But, in pointing out this circumstance as 

 diminishing the importance of Kant's speculations, Stewart 

 did not sufficiently consider that doctrines, fundamentally the 

 same, may discharge a very different office at different periods 

 of the history of philosophy. Plato's Dialogues did not de- 

 stroy, nor even diminish, the value of Cudworth's " Immu- 

 table Morality." Notwithstanding Cudworth's publications, 

 Price's doctrines came out a little afterwards with the air 

 and with the effect of novelties. Cudworth's assertion of 

 ideas did not prevent the rise of Hume's skepticism ; and it 

 was Hume's skepticism which gave occasion to Kant's new 

 assertion of necessary and universal truth, and to his exami- 

 nation into the grounds of the possibility and reality of such 

 truth. To maintain such doctrine after the appearance of 



