Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/26

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THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
[Vol. I.

has done it in a way that leaves nothing to be desired. No work of the same value has appeared in the region of pure philosophy since the publication of the late Professor Green's Prolegomena to Ethics. Mr. Caird's review of the philosophy of Kant has brought him face to face with all the problems of the higher philosophy, and it is safe to say that there is no topic which has not received at his hands the peculiar illumination that comes from breadth of culture and from speculative depth and subtlety. The author has displayed extraordinary patience and industry in tracing every idea of Kant from its first imperfect presentation to its final form, and he has gone on to show the further development which it must receive if we are to have a consistent and adequate theory. In these two volumes the reader will find a complete statement of the whole of Kant's philosophy, and a masterly criticism of it from the point of view of Absolute Idealism. Thus even those who cannot accept the author's results have now the data from which to form an adequate estimate of the value of the Critical Philosophy and of that Idealism which historically issued from it. The introductory chapter on the Idea of Criticism may be especially commended to those who still imagine that Idealism consists in the reduction of knowledge to passing states of the individual subject. They will there find this crude hypothesis exhibited as the great foe of a true Idealism. It is not my intention to give a formal review of Mr. Caird's book, but rather to bring out in my own way the contrast between the Critical Philosophy and Idealism, with special reference to the Kantian doctrine of the limitation of knowledge to objects in space and time. For a full treatment of this and other problems the reader is referred to Mr. Caird's work.

It is a fundamental mistake, as Mr. Caird shows, to regard the work of Kant as consisting simply in the limitation of knowledge to phenomena. The distinction of the phenomenal from the real is valued by him mainly as a means of preserving the reality of God, freedom, and immortality; and it is, moreover, a distinction that, as his thought develops, alters its complexion and almost results in an euthanasia. The peculiarity and the merit of Kant is that he seeks to do justice on the one