THE CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT. Immanuel Kant

As he says elsewhere (Introduction to Logic, ix. p. 60), “That man is morally unbelieving who does not accept that which, though impossible to know, is morally necessary to suppose.” And as far as he goes a Theist may agree with him, and he has done yeoman’s service to Theism by his insistence on the absolute impossibility of any other working hypothesis as an explanation of the phenomena of nature. But I have endeavoured to indicate at what points he does not seem to me to have gone as far as even his own declared principles would justify him in going. If the existence of a Supreme Mind be a “thing of faith,” this may with equal justice be said of the finite minds of the men all around us; and his attempt to show that the argument from analogy is here without foundation is not convincing.

      Kant, however, in the Critique of Judgement is sadly fettered by the chains that he himself had forged, and frequently chafes under the restraints they impose. He indicates more than once a point of view higher than that of the Critique of Pure Reason, from which the phenomena of life and mind may be contemplated. He had already hinted in that work that the supersensible substrate of the ego and the non-ego might be identical. “Both kinds of objects differ from each other, not internally, but only so far as the one appears external to the other; possibly what is at the basis of phenomenal matter as a thing in itself may not be so heterogeneous after all as we imagine.”4 This hypothesis which remains a bare undeveloped possibility in the earlier work is put forward as a positive doctrine in the Critique of Judgement. “There must,” says Kant, “be a ground of the unity of the supersensible, which lies at the basis of nature, with that which the concept of freedom practically contains” (Introduction, p. 13). That is to say, he maintains that to explain the phenomena of organic life and the purposiveness of nature we must hold that the world of sense is not disparate from and opposed to the world of thought, but that nature is the development of freedom. The connexion of nature and freedom is suggested by, nay is involved in, the notion of natural adaptation; and although we can arrive at no knowledge of the supersensible substrate of both, yet such a common ground there must be. This principle is the starting-point of the systems which followed that of Kant; and the philosophy of later Idealism is little more than a development of the principle in its consequences.

      He approaches the same doctrine by a different path in the Critique of the Teleological Judgement (§ 77), where he argues that the distinction between the mechanical and the teleological working of nature, upon which so much stress has been justly laid, depends for its validity upon the peculiar character of our Understanding. When we give what may be called a mechanical elucidation of any natural phenomenon, we begin with its parts, and from what we know of them we explain the whole. But in the case of certain objects, e.g. organised bodies, this cannot be done. In their case we can only account for the parts by a reference to the whole. Now, were it possible for us to perceive a whole before its parts and derive the latter from the former,5 then an organism would be capable of being understood and would be an object of knowledge in the strictest sense. But our Understanding is not able to do this, and its inadequacy for such a task leads us to conceive the possibility of an Understanding, not discursive like ours, but intuitive, for which knowledge of the whole would precede that of the parts. “It is at least possible to consider the material world as mere phenomenon, and to think as its substrate something like a thing in itself (which is not phenomenon), and to attach to this a corresponding intellectual intuition. Thus there would be, although incognisable by us, a supersensible real ground for nature, to which we ourselves belong” (p. 325). Hence, although Mechanism and Technic must not be confused and must ever stand side by side in our scientific investigation of natural law, yet must they be regarded as coalescing in a single higher principle incognisable by us. The ground of union is “the supersensible substrate of nature of which we can determine nothing positively, except that it is the being in itself of which we merely know the phenomenon.” Thus, then, it appears that the whole force of Kant’s main argument has proceeded upon an assumption, viz. the permanent opposition between Sense and Understanding, which the progress of the argument has shown to be unsound. “Kant seems,” says Goethe,6 “to have woven a certain element of irony into his method. For, while at one time he seemed to be bent on limiting our faculties of knowledge in the narrowest way, at another time he pointed, as it were with a side gesture, beyond the limits which he himself had drawn.” The fact of adaptation of means to ends observable in nature seems to break down the barrier between Nature and Freedom; and if we once relinquish the distinction between Mechanism and Technic in the operations of nature we are led to the Idea of an absolute Being, who manifests Himself by action which, though necessary, is yet the outcome of perfect freedom.

      Kant, however, though he approaches such a position more than once, can never be said to have risen to it. He deprecates unceasingly the attempt to combine principles of nature with the principles of freedom as a task beyond the modest capacity of human reason; and while strenuously insisting on the practical force of the Moral Argument for the Being of God, which is found in the witness of man’s conscience, will not admit that it can in any way be regarded as strengthening the theoretical arguments adduced by Teleology. The two lines of proof, he holds, are quite distinct; and nothing but confusion and intellectual disaster can result from the effort to combine them. The moral proof stands by itself, and it needs no such crutches as the argument from Design can offer. But, as Mr. Kennedy has pointed out in his acute criticism7 of the Kantian doctrine of Theism, it would not be possible to combine a theoretical disbelief in God with a frank acceptance of the practical belief of His existence borne in upon us by the Moral Law. Kant himself admits this: “A dogmatical unbelief,” he says (p. 411), “cannot subsist together with a moral maxim dominant in the mental attitude.” That is, though the theoretical argument be incomplete, we cannot reject the conclusion to which it leads, for this is confirmed by the moral necessities of conscience.

      Kant’s position, then, seems to come to this, that though he never doubts the existence of God, he has very grave doubts that He can be theoretically known by man. That He is, is certain; what He is, we cannot determine. It is a position not dissimilar to current Agnostic doctrines; and as long as the antithesis between Sense and Understanding, between Matter and Mind, is insisted upon as expressing a real and abiding truth, Kant’s reasoning can hardly be refuted with completeness. No doubt it may be urged that since the practical and theoretical arguments both arrive at the same conclusion, the cogency of our reasoning in the latter should confirm our trust in the former. But true conclusions may sometimes seem to follow from quite insufficient premises; and Kant is thus justified in demanding that each argument shall be submitted to independent tests. I have endeavoured to show above that he has not treated the theoretical line of reasoning quite fairly, and that he has underestimated its force; but its value as an argument is not increased by showing that another entirely different process of thought leads to the same result. And that the witness of conscience affords the most powerful and convincing argument for the existence of a Supreme Being, the source of law as of love, is a simple matter of experience. Induction, syllogism, analogy, do not really generate belief in God, though they may serve to justify to reason a faith that we already possess. The poet has the truth of it:

      Wer Gott nicht fühlt in sich und allen Lebenskreisen,

       Dem werdet Ihr Ihn nicht beweisen mit Beweisen.

      * * * * *

      I give at the end of this Introduction a Glossary of the chief philosophical terms used by Kant; I have tried to render them by the same English equivalents all through the work, in order to preserve, as far as may be, the exactness of expression in the original. I am conscious that this makes the translation clumsy in many places, but have thought it best to sacrifice elegance to precision. This course is the more necessary to adopt, as Kant cannot be understood unless his nice verbal distinctions be attended to. Thus real means quite a different thing from wirklich; Hang from Neigung; Rührung from Affekt or Leidenschaft; Anschauung from Empfindung or Wahrnehmung; Endzweck from letzter Zweck; Idee from Vorstellung; Eigenschaft from Attribut or Beschaffenheit; Schranke from Grenze; überreden from überzeugen, etc. I am not satisfied with “gratification” and “grief” as the English equivalents for Vergnügen and Schmerz; but it is necessary to distinguish these words from Lust