NATURE 



361 



THURSDAY, AUGUST 17, 1882 



THE LIFE OF JM MANUEL KANT 

 The Life of Immanuel Kant. By J. H. W. Stuckenberg, 

 D.D., late Professor in Wittenberg College, Ohio. 

 (London : Macmillan and Co., 1882.) 



IN a former number occasion was taken — in connection 

 with a review of Prof. Max Muller's translation of the 

 "Kritik der reinen Vernunft " — to examine at some 

 length the position of Kant's theory of experience in 

 relation to scientific method. 



Dr. Stuckenberg' s book is of an order different from 

 that of Prof. Max Muller's book. It has no pretensions 

 to brilliance, nor does it attempt to reproduce the system 

 of the thinker whose life forms its subject. It is a plain 

 book, written for such plain people as are content to hear 

 what sort of man Kant was without learning much of his 

 teaching. But its plainness notwithstanding, it is a very 

 useful work, abounding as it does in facts and common 

 sense. No one can read it and continue to go about his 

 business with the old impression that Kant was a meta- 

 physical dreamer of that a priori school which found its 

 apotheosis in Hegel as popularly conceived. We learn 

 from Dr. Stuckenberg' s pages, what ought to be much 

 better understood than is currently the case, that Kant 

 was an inquirer into the facts of nature, who was forced 

 by the difficulties which presented themselves in his 

 generalisations to investigate the constitution of experi- 

 ence itself. And we have material sufficient to enable us 

 to gather that Kant's method in his criticism of knowledge 

 was precisely the same as his method in his earlier criti- 

 cism of nature. It is perhaps not to be wondered at that 

 philosophy should since 184S have fallen into bad repute. 

 But it is to be wondered at, that with two or three excep- 

 tions, the English exponents of the sort of philosophy 

 which is most in favour among educated men in this 

 country, should know so little about the teaching of the 

 great successor of Hume, a teacher whose criticisms have 

 a greater and more important bearing upon the question 

 of method than have those of Hume himself. 



Apart from his work in philosophy and in mathematical 

 physics and astronomy, the life of Kant is of peculiar 

 interest in itself. He contributed largely to the bringing 

 about of that revolution in literature which was carried to 

 its consequences by Herder and Lessing, and which 

 culminated in Goethe. He probably did more than any 

 other man — even than Goethe — to give to Germany the 

 intellectual position which she held in the early years of 

 this century. But just because Kant's work was never of 

 an order readily intelligible to ordinarily educated men, 

 he remains to this day for the most part merely a great 

 personality about whose thoughts little is known. What 

 Kant was, as distinguished from what he did, will at least 

 be collected from the pages of Dr. Stuckenberg. 



It is open to doubt whether there is any idea about 

 which educated people deceive themselves more than the 

 supposed distinction between the " high a priori " method 

 of philosophy and the experimental method of science. 

 The methods of science and philosophy are really indis- 

 tinguishable. They consist simply in the application of 

 a previously conceived hypothesis to a given state of facts 

 Vol. xxvi.— No. 668 



and the acceptation or rejection of the hypothesis accord- 

 ing as it is or is not in harmony with these facts and 

 adequate to their explanation. The exact sciences are 

 distinguished from other sciences by the possibility of 

 determining in their examples the question of harmony 

 and adequacy in part at least by measurement. But 

 there is much that comes properly within the description 

 of science that is not exact science. Much of the body 

 of doctrine which for example constitutes the science of 

 biology cannot be tested by measurement, and hardly any 

 of the conceptions of such branches of knowledge as 

 philology or political economy can be so verified. If with 

 Kant we look on philosophy as the science of knowledge 

 itself as distinguished from its objects, and in this light 

 examine the history of modern thought since his time, we 

 find a conception of the nature of experience gradually 

 evolved and developed by precisely the same process as 

 in the case of the sciences — exact and otherwise. To 

 understand how the idea of a difference in method sprang 

 up it is necessary to go back to the pre-Kantian philo- 

 sophers. Then there certainly did exist (just as there 

 have existed in recent times) an almost universal belief 

 (dissented from by Locke and his successors in England) 

 that it was possible to deduce the nature of things by 

 a priori reasoning from principles. And this belief was 

 entertained by men of science almost as widely as by 

 metaphysicians. Kant finally did for philosophy what 

 Bacon did for science, and a careful consideration of the 

 aberrations of some of his true successors show that how- 

 ever much they may have drifted into eccentricities they 

 never lost sight of the new departure. No one for example 

 who has given attention to the " Naturphilosophie " of 

 Hegel supposes that Hegel meant to "deduce" Nature, 

 or that he is dealing with anything else than the applica- 

 tion of his fundamental conceptions to a certain phase of 

 the problem of the constitution of knowledge. And yet 

 not a few eminent critics have mistaken Hegelian irony 

 for serious earnest. The time has come for recognising 

 the fact that the rejection of the philosophical method, if 

 it means anything at all, means the rejection of all that in 

 science is not capable of reduction to space measurement, 

 and men of science would do well to try to find out how 

 much is implied in such a rejection. For such a purpose 

 nothing is so well adapted as the study of Kant's works. 

 Kant was a man of science who came ultimately to philo- 

 sophy as a form of science. And for him the main feature 

 of philosophy was that it purged the special sciences of a 

 vast quantity of bad metaphysics, of unconscious assump- 

 tions which have been the real reason of those ultimate 

 contradictions in their conceptions, which in modern times 

 have proved so great a difficulty to the most acute investi- 

 gators. It was not until middle age that he turned his 

 attention to difficulties which had been forced upon his 

 notice in the course of his researches in mathematical 

 physics and biology. 



One of the main lessons to be learned from Kant is the 

 necessity of extreme caution in the formulation of the 

 terms of all general problems. No one who has carefully 

 studied Kant is likely to speak of the transition from the 

 region of mechanism into that of organisation, or of the 

 physical atom as conceivable objects of experience. Still 

 less is he likely to reason about mind as though it were a 

 form of energy, a substance or a thing. He will find himself 



