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His practical philosophy takes from Kant its independence of theoretical philosophy, the disinterested character of aesthetic judgment, the absoluteness of ethical values, the non-empirical origin of the moral concepts: "The fundamental ethical relations are not drawn from experience."
The latter, especially, is in a peculiar manner distinct from all empirically-conditioned faculties, for it employs ideas alone in the consideration of its objects, and by means of these determines the understanding, which then proceeds to make an empirical use of its own conceptions, which, like the ideas of reason, are pure and non-empirical.
The chapter on the distinction between phenomena and noumena very much lessens the hopes, aroused, perchance, by the establishment of the non-empirical origin of the categories, for an application of these not confined to any experience. They "serve only to spell phenomena, that we may be able to read them as experience," and when applied to things in themselves lose all significance.
All sensuous phenomena may be contingent, and consequently possess only an empirically conditioned existence, and yet there may also exist a non-empirical condition of the whole series, or, in other words, a necessary being.
But Hegel saw this undeniable characteristic of the world we live in in a non-empirical light. Let the mental idea of the thing work in your thought all alone, he fancied, and just the same consequences will follow. It will be negated by the opposite ideas that dog it, and can survive only by entering, along with them, into some kind of treaty.
In the "transcendental" exposition of space and time Kant follows this "metaphysical" exposition, which had to prove their non-empirical, and non-discursive, hence their a priori and intuitive, character, with the proof that only such an explanation of space and time could make it conceivable how synthetic cognitions a priori can arise from them. The principles of mathematics are of this kind.
Kant's undertaking was aimed at the destruction of a non-experiential science from concepts, and if it has not succeeded in preventing the neo-Scholasticism of the Fichtean school, with its overdrawn attempts to revive a deductive knowledge of the absolute, this has been chiefly due to the false, non-empirical method of the great critic of reason.
Is it not rather possible that, although every effect in the phenomenal world must be connected with an empirical cause, according to the universal law of nature, this empirical causality may be itself the effect of a non-empirical and intelligible causality its connection with natural causes remaining nevertheless intact?
Moreover, a most careful discrimination is daily becoming more necessary, in the teaching of traditional religion of a supernatural and non-empirical type. Many of its elements must no doubt be retained by us, for the child-mind demands firm outlines and examples and imagery drawn from the world of sense. Yet grave dangers are attached to it.
An a priori or non-empirical conception contains either a pure intuition and in this case it can be constructed; or it contains nothing but the synthesis of possible intuitions, which are not given a priori.
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