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And more particularly, how can there be knowledge of general propositions in cases where we have not examined all the instances, and indeed never can examine them all, because their number is infinite? Immanuel Kant is generally regarded as the greatest of the modern philosophers.
Kant with deeper penetration indicated its tendency to become despotic. Good government, according to Aristotle, is that of one, of few, or of many, for the sake of all.
Yet it may be readily supposed that to Kant, at the age of seventy-eight, changes, even for the better, were not welcome: so intense had been the uniformity of his life and habits, that the least innovation in the arrangement of articles as trifling as a penknife, or a pair of scissors, disturbed him; and not merely if they were pushed two or three inches out of their customary position, but even if they were laid a little awry; and as to larger objects, such as chairs, &c., any dislocation of their usual arrangement, any trans position, or addition to their number, perfectly confounded him; and his eye appeared restlessly to haunt the seat of the mal- arrangement, until the ancient order was restored.
Much more influential was the elaborate answer of Kant, which has profoundly affected the course of Metaphysics since its publication. Reverting in principle to the platonic method, Kant again sought the enduring elements, the fundamentals of Science, in the constitution of the cognitive faculty itself.
Only not from abstract concepts. Kant and the Illumination stand on the platform of reflection, for which the antithesis of thought and being, finite and infinite remains insoluble, and, consequently, the absolute transcendent, and the true essence of things unknowable. Hegel wishes to combine the advantages of both sides, the depth of content of the one, and the scientific form of the other.
Among them were to be found lay symbolists and clerical symbolists. They introduced philosophic rag-pickers, sociological grisettes, prophetic bakers, and apostolic fishermen to the stage. Goethe spoke of the artists of his day, "who reproduced the ideas of Kant in allegorical pictures." The artists of Christophe's day wrote sociology in semi-quavers.
And then over against this he indicates his fatal confusion of mind and weakness of reasoning in the suggestion: "But the sound human understanding, in spite of the moralists, will prevaricate, and often with great vigor and success, in such cases. Who is right, Kant, or the common moral sense? Which should be followed, the philosophic morality, or the practice of otherwise most truthful men?"
The great distinction between teachers sacred or literary, between poets like Herbert, and poets like Pope, between philosophers like Spinoza, Kant and Coleridge, and philosophers like Locke, Paley, Mackintosh and Stewart, between men of the world who are reckoned accomplished talkers, and here and there a fervent mystic, prophesying half insane under the infinitude of his thought, is that one class speak from within, or from experience, as parties and possessors of the fact; and the other class from without, as spectators merely, or perhaps as acquainted with the fact on the evidence of third persons.
For if modern Pantheism be indebted to Spinoza for its substance, it is equally indebted to Kant for its form; and no intelligible account can be given of the phases which it has successively assumed, without reference to the powerful influence which his Philosophy, in one or other of its constituent elements, has exerted on all his successors in the same field of inquiry.
One of them, whose department was philosophy, especially interested and encouraged me by assurances that the movement of Russian philosophy is "back to Kant." In the strange welter of whims and dreams which one finds in Russia, this was to me an unexpected evidence of healthful thought.
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