194 W. L. COURTNEY, M-A., LL.D., ON 
Kant’s view of the bent and bearing of his own positions, but what 
were the views of his contemporaries regarding them ? In a word, 
most will attach more importance to the opinions of a philosophic 
critic, touching the questions handled here, than to those of 
sympathetic expositor and apologist. When Kant relegated belief 
in God, Immortality, and human Freedom to the sphere of the 
transcendental—the intuitional, incomprehensible, insoluble—he, 
no doubt, thought he was conferring a great boon not only on 
philosophy but on religion itse'f.* But his followers refused to see 
this, and even hastened to employ his transcendental conceptions 
to buttress the fabric reared by Hume,—‘t Whatever lies beyond 
experience is incapable of proof.’ The question which Hume 
faced was “‘ Have we any ideas independent of Experience?” And 
his answer was ‘“ Experience itself is incompetent to determine 
absolute truth.’ All, then, that Experience itself could do, was to 
beget scepticism. Kant asked what is the nature of the Experience 
which thus landed thinkers in scepticism? This led him to 
subject Reason to critical investigation. Discarding the views of 
the prevailing sensational school, he harked back on @ priori 
elements of knowledge, and, sifting them, he concluded that there 
are two sources of knowledge, experience and understanding. All 
our knowledge begins with the former, but there is a knowledge 
independent of it—ideas that are universal and certain, not 
absolutely, but only subjectively true. Thus perfect knowledge, 
that is, knowledge of things in themselves, is impossible. Was not 
Lewes right when he affirmed,—“ We regard the result of Kant’s 
investigation of the elements of thought as nothing less than a 
scientific basis for Scepticism? ”’ I think he was, and, if so, then 
the chief contention of this paper will at least be doubtful. 
Even throughout it, point after point occurs suggestive of the 
influence of Hume on Kant, and most interpreters of the Kantian 
philosophy to other than metaphysical experts, have directed 
special attention to the fact that “it was chiefly the scepticism of 
Hume which incited Kant to the construction of his critical 
philosophy” (Ueberweg). Indeed, Kant himself puts his indebted- 
ness to Hume ina very graphic way. Thus, as to the conception 
of causality, he says,—‘‘ I confess freely that it was the exception 
* This would suggest that there were causes operating at the time 
which tended to errors which Kant wrote his critiques to combat.— Eb. 
