INTRODUCTION.
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name. This misapplication, or lax employment of the criterion, was Kant's doing; and frightful confusion has been the result. In our own country Kant's example has been followed, and to some extent preceded. The necessary truths of reason, when touched upon by our philosophers, have been so uncritically sifted; they have been so mixed up and confounded with the truths of mere contingency,—the two classes being, to a large extent, absolutely placed on a par in point of authority, whereby the distinction between them is rendered void and of no effect,—that the prospects of our philosophy, and the interests of speculative thought, would have been fully more promising had the necessary truths not been meddled with at all.[1]
- ↑ In confirmation of what is said in this paragraph, the reader is referred to the very perplexed and erroneous distinction laid down by Kant, between what he calls analytic and synthetic judgments.—See Kritik der reinen Vernunft; Einleitung, §§ iv. v.
There is, according to Kant, a class of judgments or propositions in which the predicate merely expresses some conception already involved in the conception of the subject. "All bodies are extended," Is an example of this class of propositions. Here the conception of extension is already contained in the conception of body; and hence the proposition adds nothing to our knowledge: it is merely explicative, or resolvent; or, in the language of Kant, It is an analytic judgment. All propositions of this kind express a priori or necessary truths; and their criterion is the law of contradiction; for it is obvious that to say, "All bodies are not extended"—when we have once involved extension in the conception of body—is equivalent to saying bodies are not bodies.
There is another class of judgments to which Kant gives the name of synthetic. In synthetic propositions the predicate is said to express, and very often does express, some conception which is not already involved in the conception of the subject. They add to our knowledge: hence they have been sometimes called ampliative judg-
