was thought to lie open to an interpretation in conformity with
the spirit of his logic, in the sense that the form and the content
in knowledge are not merely distinguishable functions
Form of Matter of Thought.
within an organic whole, but either separable, or
at least indifferent one to the other in such a way as to
be clearly independent. Thought as form would thus
be a factor or an element in a composite unit. It would clearly
have its own laws. It would be the whole concern of logic,
which, since in it thought has itself for object, would have no
reference to the other term of the antithesis, nor properly and
immediately to the knowledge which is compact of thought
in conjunction with something which, whatever it may be, is
prima facie other than thought. There is too much textual
warrant for this interpretation of Kant’s meaning. Doubtless
there are passages which make against an extreme dualistic
interpretation. Even in his “logic” Kant speaks of abstraction
from all particular objects of thought rather than of a resolution
of concrete thinking into thought and its “other” as separable
co-operating factors in a joint product. He spoke throughout,
however, as if form and content were mutually indifferent, so
that the abstraction of form from content implied nothing of
falsification or mutilation. The reserve, therefore, that it was
abstraction and not a decomposing that was in question remained
to the admirers of his logic quite nugatory. They failed to
realize that permissible abstraction from specific contents or
methods of knowledge does not obliterate reference to matter
or content. They passed easily from the acceptance of a priori
forms of thinking to that of forms of a priori thinking, and could
plead the example of Kant’s logic.
Kant’s theory of knowledge, then, needed to be pressed to other consequences for logic which were more consonant with the spirit of the Critique. The forms of thought and what gives thought its particular content in concrete acts of thinking could not be regarded as subsisting in a purely external and indifferent relation one to the other. “Laws according to which the subject thinks” and “laws according to which the object is known” cannot be the concern of separate departments of inquiry. As soon divorce the investigation of the shape and material of a mirror from the laws of the incidence of the rays that form images in it, and call it a science of reflection! An important group of writers developed the conception of an adaptation between the two sides of Kant’s antithesis, and made the endeavour to establish some kind of correlation between logical forms and the process of “the given.” There was a tendency to fall back upon the conception of some kind of parallelism, whether it was taken to be interpretative or rather corrective of Kant’s meaning. This device was never remote from the constructions of writers for whom the teaching of Spinoza and Leibnitz was an integral part of their intellectual equipment. Other modes of correlation, however, find favour also, and in some variety. Kant is seldom the sole source of inspiration. His unresolved antithesis[1] is interpreted either diversely or with a difference of emphasis. And the light that later writers bring to bear on Kant’s logic and epistemology from other sides of his speculation varies in kind and in degree.
Another logical movement springs from those whom a correlation of fact within the unity of a system altogether failed to satisfy. There must also be development of the correlated terms from a single principle. Form and content must not only correspond one to the other. They must be exhibited as distinguishable moments within a unity which can at one and the same time be seen to be the ground from which the distinction springs and the ground in virtue of which it is over-ruled. Along this line of speculation we have a logic which claims that whatsoever is in one plane or at one stage in the development of thought a residuum that apparently defies analysis must at another stage and on a higher plane be shown so to be absorbed as to fall altogether within thought. This is the view of Hegel upon which logic comes to coincide with the progressive self-unfolding of thought in that type of metaphysic which is known as absolute, i.e. all-inclusive idealism. The exponent of logic as metaphysic, for whom the rational is the real is necessarily in revolt against all that is characteristically Kantian in the theory of knowledge, against the transcendental method itself and against the doctrine of limits which constitutes the nerve of “criticism.” Stress was to be laid upon the constructive character of the act of thought which Kant had recognized, and without Kant’s qualifications of it. In all else the claim is made to have left the Kantian teaching behind as a cancelled level of speculation.
Transcendental method is indeed not invulnerable. A principle is transcendentally “deduced” when it and only it can explain the validity of some phase of experience, some order of truths. The order of truths, the phase of experience and its certainty had to be taken for granted. The Limitation of Transcenden-tal Method. sense, for example, in which the irreversibility of sequence which is the more known in ordine ad hominem in the case of the causal principle differs from merely psychological conviction is not made fully clear. Even so the inference to the a priori ground of its necessity is, it has been often pointed out, subject to the limitation inherent in any process of reduction, in any regress, that is, from conditionate to condition, viz. that in theory an alternative is still possible. The inferred principle may hold the field as explanation without obvious competitor potential or actual. Nevertheless its claim to be the sole possible explanation can in nowise be validated. It has been established after all by dialectic in the Aristotelian sense of the word. But if transcendental method has no special pride of place, Kant’s conclusion as to the limits of the competence of intellectual faculty falls with it. Cognition manifestly needs the help of Reason even in its theoretical use. Its speculation can no longer be stigmatized as vaticination in vacuo, nor its results as illusory.
Finally, to logic as metaphysic the polar antithesis is psychology as logic. The turn of this also was to come again. If logic were treated as merely formal, the stress of the problem of knowledge fell upon the determination of the processes of the psychological mechanism. If alleged Logic and Psychology. a priori constituents of knowledge—such rubrics as substance, property, relation—come to be explained psychologically, the formal logic that has perforce to ignore all that belongs to psychology is confined within too narrow a range to be able to maintain its place as an independent discipline, and tends to be merged in psychology. This tendency is to be seen in the activity of Fries and Herbart and Beneke, and was actualized as the aftermath of their speculation. It is no accident that it was the psychology of apperception and the voluntaryist theory or practice of Herbart, whose logical theory was so closely allied to that of the formal logicians proper, that contributed most
- ↑ Or antitheses. Kant follows, for example, a different line of cleavage between form and content from that developed between thought and the “given.” And these are not his only unresolved dualities, even in the Critique of Pure Reason. For the logical inquiry, however, it is permissible to ignore or reduce these differences. The determination too of the sense in which Kant’s theory of knowledge involves an unresolved antithesis is for the logical purpose necessary so far only as it throws light upon his logic and his influence upon logical developments. Historically the question of the extent to which writers adopted the dualistic interpretation or one that had the like consequences is of greater importance. It may be said summarily that Kant holds the antithesis between thought and “the given” to be unresolved and within the limits of theory of knowledge irreducible. The dove of thought falls lifeless if the resistant atmosphere of “the given” be withdrawn (Critique of Pure Reason, ed. 2 Introd. Kant’s Werke, ed. of the Prussian Academy, vol. iii. p. 32, ll. 10 sqq.). Nevertheless the thing-in-itself is a problematic conception and of a limiting or negative use merely. He “had woven,” according to an often quoted phrase of Goethe, “a certain sly element of irony into his method; ... he pointed as it were with a side gesture beyond the limits which he himself had drawn.” Thus (loc. cit. p. 46, ll. 8, 9) he declares that “there are two lineages united in human knowledge, which perhaps spring from a common stock, though to us unknown—namely sense and understanding.” Some indication of the way in which he would hypothetically and speculatively mitigate the antithesis is perhaps afforded by the reflection that the distinction of the mental and what appears as material is an external distinction in which the one appears outside to the other. “Yet what as thing-in-itself lies back of the phenomenon may perhaps not be so wholly disparate after all” (ib. p. 278, ll. 26 sqq.).
