save only Spinoza and Leibnitz, continued to overlook it; and just as Kant himself came to the conviction that it must be disregarded, so far as concerned any knowable objective, and consequently felt obliged to declare that the objective character of a cognition lay simply in its necessity,[1] — a doctrine which, for the next obvious move, forced philosophy upon the awkward alternative of either (1) admitting this "necessity" to be merely the dominating proclivity of the isolated self, and so, as Hume had contended, merely a subjective necessity, or else (2) returning, though by the route of an idealistic cosmology, essentially to the view of Spinoza, translating the “necessity” into necessitation, operated upon (and in) each self, as a mode of the One Thinking Reality, by the all-inclusive and all-pervasive Absolute Self.
This latter branch of the alternative, Kant, as we all know, deliberately rejected, because he so clearly and correctly discerned its fatal inconsistency with personal autonomy, and thence with moral responsibility; and he chose, rather, to refer our consciousness of duty — that is, of devout obligation to other minds as the only strict Ends — to our good-faith, our pure fealty, toward a bare ideal. Consequently
- ↑ See the various forms of his “Deduction” of the categories, passim, as presented in the first and second editions of the Critique, and in his Reflexions, edited by Benno Erdmann.
