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Among the various differences of opinion which exist within the neo-Kantian ranks, the most important relates to the question, whether the individual ego or a transcendental consciousness is to be looked upon as the executor of the a priori functions.
In recent years there has been a reaction against empirical doctrines on the basis of neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian principles. Foremost among the leaders of this movement we may mention T.H. Green. Hamilton bases philosophy on the facts of consciousness, but, in antithesis to the associational psychology, emphasizes the mental activity of discrimination and judgment.
The writings of Liebmann, Cohen, Stadler, Riehl, Volkelt, and others will be mentioned later, in connection with the neo-Kantian movement; here we may give some of the more important monographs and essays, selected from the enormously developed Kantian literature: Ad.
When the neo-Kantian movement is examined, we find that its long and honourable history presents us with gains which cannot be measured. It has made man realise that the connection of body and mind is not so simple a matter as materialistic naturalism would lead us to suppose; and it has shown, on the whole, the impossibility of reducing consciousness to mechanical elements.
The latest decades have been the first to bring a change for the better, in so far as new rallying points of philosophical interest have been created by the neo-Kantian movement, by the systems of Lotze and Von Hartmann, by the impulse toward the philosophy of nature proceeding from Darwinism, by energetic labors in the field of practical philosophy, and by new methods of investigation in psychology.
Whether space, as Leibnitz maintains, be an order of coexistence and time an order of sequences, whether it be by space that we succeed in representing time or whether time be an essential form of any representation, whether time be the father of space or space the father of time, one thing is certain, which is that the efforts of the Kantian or neo-Kantian apriorists and of the pure empiricists and the idealistic empiricists all end in the same darkness; that all the philosophers who have grappled with the formidable dual problem, among whom one may mention indiscriminately the names of the greatest thinkers of yesterday and to-day Herbert Spencer, Helmholtz, Renouvier, James Sully, Stumpf, James Ward, William James, Stuart Mill, Ribot, Fouillee, Guyau, Bain, Lechalas, Balmes, Dunan and endless others have been unable to tame it; and that, however much their theories may contradict one another, they are all equally defensible and alike struggle vainly in the darkness against shadows that are not of our world.
When we turn to the great neo-Kantian movement, we find alongside of discussions concerning psychological questions important ethical aspects presenting themselves. G. Simmel point in the same direction. Professors Husserl, Lipps, and Vaihinger, as their most recent important books show, work on lines which insist on bringing life as it is and as it ought to be into their systems.
They mean for him what is present within their spiritual content as a realisation as well as the More to which they still point. After having followed the implications of the neo-Kantian movement so far, he feels compelled to take the next step. For unless that next step is taken, some of the deepest potencies of human nature fail to come to flower and fruit.
In the philosophy of religion, which is discussed especially by the theologians, a neo-Kantian and a neo-Hegelian tendency confront each other.
By this he means, on the one hand, the "absolute idealism" which constructed systems entirely unconnected with science or experience systems whose Absolute had no direct relationship with man, or which made no appeal to anything of a similar nature to itself in the deeper experience of the soul; and, on the other hand, the degeneration of the neo-Kantian movement to a mere description of the relations of bodily and mental processes.
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