Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 2 Kant -- The Philosopher of the Revolution
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ROUSSEAU'S conception, which I have stated in as brief a fashion as possible, had a very great influence on Kant, in the development of his doctrine. As I have indicated, Rousseau's Contrat social was really the gospel of the French Revolution. It was good rhetoric and took hold on great groups of people. It was simply stated, so that the ideas could pass into untrained minds. His abstract idea that the rights of all the individuals in the community were the basis of the state, was put into common terms. If you can put the action of the state in terms of the rights of individuals, you can make the members of the state both subject and sovereign, and it is not necessary to set up a monarch in whom all rights rest. Hobbes talked about natural rights, but they were only the rights of might. Such rights would all have to be handed over to a single man if there was to be any order in the state. But rights which are acknowledged and which have value only in so far as they are acknowledged, rights which carry with them the condition of obligations, can be enacted only in a democratic community. If the people want property, then they want that which everyone recognizes, which everyone in some sense possesses, which everyone wishes to maintain. This conception, of course, can be carried over from property to other institutions in the community. In that sense it can be made universal. This character of the community is something which flows from the character of human nature itself, from its rational character. Rousseau said that rights, in this sense, are universal, that is, rational. In so far as the volitions of the community are in these terms, they can be made the laws for all.
What Kant did was to go a step farther and say that all our
(26) volitions should be of this same universal character. He generalized the position of Rousseau; he made it the basis of his moral philosophy. Rousseau indicated that the legislation of the community should have the form of the expression of rights. In so far as it did have that form, it made political structure possible. Kant went on to say that every act which a rational being carries out should take on this universal form. For him morality, as such, consists in giving a universal character to every act. In so far as an act does not have this character, it is amoral. That is, if a man seeks for something which he does not at the same time recognize as lying within the pursuit of other persons, if he seeks something simply for himself, he is, to that extent, selfish, immoral. Kant undertook to identify this doctrine with the Golden Rule. His position was that man, in his social nature, could give laws to society in so far as his own end was a universal end. What this means has been illustrated through the concept of property as over against mere possession.
Rousseau referred to those situations which gather about property, which gather about the defense of the community against the power that attacks it from the outside, about the institution of the family, about the duties and rights of enlightened education. He selected those rights which everyone recognized and insisted that in the community these ought to be universal in character. They should be universal because it is only in so far as they are universal that they have any value. An enlightenment that is confined to a single mind only, which cannot be maintained over against another person on the basis of a rationally accepted doctrine, is of no value, is not truth. A thing is true if it is in such a form that you can convince another rational person that it is true; otherwise it is not true. A family would have no meaning unless the relations of the father and mother and children were relations which were recognized by the community itself as a means of ordering the interrelations of men and women and the care of children, and unless they were the same for all members of the community.
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Kant went on to say that every act which is moral should take on this universal form. He put this in the form of a categorical imperativeSo act that the maxim of your action can be made a universal law. That is, act in every case as you do with reference to property. When you demand that you should have possession of your own property, you are demanding that everyone else should have possession of his own property. This should be the basis of all conduct, and on this basis Kant founded his moral theory. He undertook to show that the human being could be a lawgiver because he is rational; could be a sovereign because he is rational, because he a can give universal character to his volitions. Everyone would then be a lawgiver, but only in so far as be took account of the duties arising out of his volitions so that he would also be subject to the laws that he himself gave. Man's intellect, in proportion as it is rational, is a lawgiving intellect. It can create society by being universal in character. In this sense, because he generalized this principle of Rousseau's, Kant may be considered the philosopher of the revolution.
We have seen how Rousseau's principle was generalized by Kant into his categorical imperative, in the affirmation that the individual should make a general principle out of the maxim of his act, to use Kant's terminology. One should ask himself, when he is on the point of willing anything, whether he can also will that everyone else should will the same thing under the same conditions. Then he would discover whether or not his volition is universal. For example, if one wills to tell a lie, if he asks himself if he would will that everyone under the same conditions should tell a lie, he will see that this would lead to evident contradiction, because, if everyone should lie under those same conditions, then no one would believe anyone else and there would thus be no purpose in the lie.
What I have been trying to bring out is that the will of the community must take on some such form as that expressed in terms of property. It has to have an economic statement of some such form as that. It is that which makes the will of the
(28) individual the will of all, the volonté générale. If you get that sort of an expression, you have the basis for the organization of the community. And Kant, as we have seen, tried to reach this simply by making it the basis for a moral doctrine. That is, Kant said, if you could make your act formally right, it would also be right in content. And the illustration he gives is his best illustration; it is that you cannot make a lie right because you cannot make a lie universal; it contradicts itself. You have that turned around the other way in the statement of the Cretans. They had a bad reputation as to veracity in the ancient world. It was said, "All Cretans are liars." But suppose the statement that all Cretans are liars is made by a Cretan. He belongs to the group that are liars. Therefore his statement about the Cretans is a lie and the Cretans are not all liars. That is, the proposition runs into a contradiction. Kant conceived that you could use such a rule as that to determine all moral conduct. All you have to do is to try to make the maxim of your act the truth for everyone under the same conditions. The result seems to be that one should use this universality of one's act as a test of its morality. This is Kant's assumption, that if you would only make your act universal you could test it. If it involves a contradiction, it is wrong.
Kant did not succeed in that. He did not succeed even with reference to lying. There are many situations in which lying is not immoral. Sometimes it is highly moral, as in the typical case of the man who deceives an assassin trying to murder someone. We talk about morality in warfare, and, of course, warfare is a game in which you have to deceive your enemy. The general, the military strategist, succeeds by deceiving his enemy. And then we have the whole list of white lies that we always tell -- cases where. we feel we are justified in deceiving a person who insists on knowing something he has no right to know, where we give a reason which is good but which is not the real reason, in order to save somebody's feelings. There are all grades between the whiteness of truth and the blackness of lying. It is not possible to draw a hard and fast line between
(29) them. If everyone insisted on telling the truth all the time, society itself would perhaps become impossible. When Kant tried to work out other matters on the principle of the categorical imperative, such as the case of a man who wants to commit suicide in order to relieve himself from suffering from a disease and his friends from the care they will have to give him, or the case of the man who is too lazy to work although he has competence, I think the principle broke down pretty definitely.
What Kant was appealing to were values. He was not considering simply the universal form. He was considering also what the values are that give significance to life. These were what Kant really came back to. What the problem is, then, to come back to my former position, is to give a universal form to the interests of man in society. We can do that in the very abstract case of property in such a form that that which you possess is something which you want every other person to possess. A familiar illustration of that is the desire to have property itself widely distributed in the community. We say the person has a stake in the community. He cannot want to preserve that which he has without at the same time willing that others should preserve what they have. So the conservative who wants to keep the present order is anxious for a relatively wide distribution of property so that everyone, having a definite stake in the preservation of that order, will also want to preserve it. The interests of such a community must be universal in their character, which means that they shall be of such a form that when a person wills something for himself he is willing the same for others.
But, of course, the difficulty is in stating that specifically. It can be stated, as we have seen, in relation to property and also with reference to truth by the spreading of enlightenment. Truth is valuable only in a community where it has universal acceptance. If a thing is not recognized as true, then it does not function as true in the community. People have to recognize it if they are going to act on it. For example, we expect a person to be familiar with the laws of the community -
(30) the essential, fundamental principles. People have to be familiar with these and recognize them as universal. We are anxious to have universal education so that everyone may recognize the operation of natural laws. We depend on other persons knowing what we know. Otherwise knowledge has no advantage. Of course, I can get special advantage by knowing something in advance of someone else as regards the stock market; but in order to get advantage from even that type of information, it must become part of the knowledge of others as well. If I shut away my knowledge, I might get a certain satisfaction out of knowing something that would be of value if others knew it; but to give it actual value it has to become a part of the knowledge of all. There is a story of Frederick the Great, who was much beset by people who wanted honors given them. One man in particular, whom Frederick did not consider worthy, requested a particularly desired post. Finally he was told, "You can have this post on one condition." The man said that he would take it under any condition, and the emperor said, "I will grant you a privy counselorship, but under the condition that you shall never tell anyone of it at any time." The value of holding an office is in its recognition by other persons. So the knowledge which you have is of value only in so far as it is universal in character-only in so far as, being affirmed, everyone will accept it. The perfect form of your knowledge is that you can put it to proof; it is that which everyone everywhere must accept. That is the ideal, although it may never be reached with reference to truth; but that is the goal toward which knowledge proceeds.
What our different states undertake to do, so far as they are democratic, is to give rights which shall be universal in their character. Our laws try to state the rights and the privileges of individuals in such a form that they are universal-not that everyone now possesses them equally, but that everyone under the same conditions would have the same rights.
But Kant took this position not only in regard to man's will in society, that is, that man gives laws to society through
(31) the extension of his will; he also affirmed that man gives laws to nature. In his Critique of Pure Reason he approached this principle from another angle and carried it much further. There Kant undertook to show how it is possible for us to build what he called "synthetic judgments a priori." The beginning of that is that one should be able to state that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. There you have a proposition in which "straight line" is subject and "shortest distance between two points" is predicate. You can analyze the idea of "straight line," and you will not find in it that of the shortest distance between two points; and you can analyze "the shortest distance between two points," and this will not convey the idea of "straight line." Yet, you make the judgment that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. This is a synthetic judgment because it puts together ideas which are not already contained in each other. When you say that man is a rational animal, you have already defined man as rational, and it is no great trick to ascribe the same predicate that you already have in the subject. That is an analytic judgment. But the synthetic goes further than the analytic. It takes two ideas, neither of which is contained in the other, and affirms that these ideas belong together.
But where do we get our intellectual authority for this assertion? How are synthetic judgments a priori possible? In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant contends that they are a priori because in this connection, as in the categorical imperative, he came back to a type of experience which determined in advance what the forms of things should be. This lies both in the forms of space and time and in those of the understanding, that is, the logical forms. Those which belong to the sensations he called the "aesthetic, and those which belonged to the understanding he termed the "judgment." In this division, and in the argument that flows from it, Kant was trying to meet the skepticism of Hume. He said that Hume had wakened him from his dogmatic slumber.
Hume's skepticism said that all our knowledge seems to be
(32) simply an organization of our impressions and ideas -- impressions meaning sensations, and ideas mainly images. Sensations, as such, are simply the states of our own consciousness. Locke had recognized this in regard to secondary qualities-color, sound, taste, and odor. These do not belong to the object outside; and if they convey those characters to the object, we ought to recognize that they come from us. Berkeley went a step farther and said this relation was true not only of secondary qualities but also of primary qualities-of extension, of motion, and of solidity-that is, of those qualities pertaining to the occupancy of space. When one feels of a desk, one gets a sense of its solidity, its extension, and its mobility. But this is just a feeling of the individual. It is impossible to distinguish between this sensation and that of the color of the desk, as sensations. Locke admitted that the color did not belong to the desk but was simply an impression made upon us through light that reaches us from the desk. Berkeley says its extension is just another impression of the same kind.
In other words, Berkeley, who is called a subjective idealist, went a step farther than Locke and said that the world of extension is nothing but a world of our impressions. He asked why we should assume that this spatial order, which comes to us both through vision and the sense of touch, should not be regarded as relative to our sensitivities as well. What is the space about us but the impressions made upon us of things that we will say are ordered in a certain fashion? What evidence have we that that which causes these impressions has any other character than that given in our experience? We say that a vibration of a certain amplitude is responsible for the color red. That is, red is the feeling or the experience which we have when the retina is hit by these particular vibrations. With another vibration you have the impression of violet. Well, Berkeley asked, why should we assume that that which causes in us the sensation of extension is extended, if that which causes in us a sensation of red is not itself red? If this latter is not the case, why should that which causes in us impressions of extension in three dimen-
(33) -sions itself be extended in three dimensions? Is there any reason for giving any particular authority to the primary qualities which we deny to the secondary qualities? And being sure that the answer to that question was in the negative, he went on to seek what the cause of our impression could be and, being a bishop, found it is the Deity who produces in us sensations of extension though he himself is not extended. Berkeley was very sure that there must be such a power, for he said that there could be no effect without a cause and that our attitude toward these impressions, whether primary or secondary, is a passive attitude. Therefore, it could not be a cause. No man can create a sunset. The sunset is there. One can recall sunsets he has seen, a number of them, and picture in his imagination something that he has never seen on land or sea; but the pigments he uses are those which he has taken from past experience. Man is passive with regard to these sensuous experiences; therefore the cause of them must lie outside of him, in God, said Berkeley.
Hume pushes on and asks where Berkeley gets his evidence for causation. His only answer is that we have been in the habit of expecting things to happen in the future in the same order as they have happened in the past. The sun has risen regularly in the past, and we expect it to continue to do so. But the only result we can reach from analysis is the juxtaposition of two events, sunrise and sunset, so that if one has uniformly succeeded the other we expect this succession to continue in the future. In other words, Hume, in his turn, went one step farther than Berkeley, and asked him what evidence he had that there must be a cause. Why could not these things just happen? He analyzed the concept of causation, and what he found was that we expect those things to succeed each other which have succeeded each other in the past. That was all Hume could find in the so-called "law of causation." If things have succeeded each other in the past in a certain uniform way, then we expect this relation to continue in the future. If that is all that can be found out about the law of causation, it does not take us
(34) outside of our experience at all. Locke assumed that we could go outside of our experience of color and sound into a world of moving physical particles which cause such impressions as those of color and sound. Berkeley assumed that we could get outside of our experience of an extended matter to a God which caused in us the experience that we called an experience of extended matter. Hume showed that the law of causation, which led Locke to say that vibrations from outside produced in us a certain succession of color or sound, and that led Berkeley to assume that the sensation of extension must be produced by God, lies inside of experience and that there is no way of getting outside of that experience.
Hume also undertook to show that the so-called "self" is nothing but an association of certain groups of our impressions, our states of consciousness; that especially those which come to us from our own body, and those which are associated with certain other impressions, such as our own name, get firmly linked together. But that is nothing but another object, another thing. It is the most important thing in our experience, but it arises as any other object arises. From the standpoint of empirical philosophy this task involved nothing but the organization of a certain succession of color, of form, of feel, so organized together that when you see a color you naturally think of a certain feel. We see these in different situations, when they impress us somewhat differently, and we recall experiences that were true in the past. Our organization of these qualities is in such a permanent fashion that they become, for us, a fixed object. Hume assumed that the self arose also in this fashion. The baby has sensations-pleasure and pain, warmth. The sensations from his own body get associated together. If he moves his arms, he gets certain sensations; if he moves his arms again, he gets the same sensations. These get permanently organized together, particularly about the sensations which are pleasurable and painful. The infant finds itself addressed by certain words, certain names. Certain experiences come when it responds in a certain fashion. Out of this arises the association of a set of ex
(35) -periences which make another object, an object which the infant comes to call the self. He Identifies it with the "I," the "me." From that standpoint there is no functional relationship between the subject and the object. The subject is simply another object. It is a central object about which the experiences of the individual develop. But there are other objects which also become central under other conditions. Over against this empirical conception Kant brought in the idea of a transcendental self which was a sort of functional unity. But the empiricist comes back to the experience of a self. And the empiricist assumes that in order that there may be an object, there must be a subject. The two involve each other. For Kant this subject-object relationship, however, is not static; it is not such a relationship as that spoken of in which certain impressions are made on the mind, in which physical things in some fashion impress a consciousness which lies inside the mind. It is not that sort of a relationship, but one in which we have one phase of a process necessarily leading to another phase, and that phase leading back to the first. This is the typical situation in a subject-object relationship.
The position which Kant took was a more or less natural development of the position reached by the English empiricists. Their result was skeptical, at least it was in Hume's statement. He undertook to show that there could be no knowledge of an object. Objects as such were broken up into sensations and images, or impressions and ideas, to use his words. He analyzed objects simply into a set of these impressions and ideas, and the connections between them were those of association. The connectivity then also belonged to experience, and, for Hume, was psychological in character. That is, there is no way of getting from these impressions and ideas over to an object which lies outside of them and is supposed to be the cause of them. He analyzed the idea of causation and carried it back to the simple expectancy that the succession of impressions and ideas that has taken place in the past shall continue in the future. He could find no ground for this except in a habit, a
(36) habit which he recognized as being so strong that we could not avoid acting upon it. But in no way could we get outside of impressions and ideas.
Kant's reaction against skepticism was against the skepticism of Hume. What Hume had pointed out was that the world which arises in experience is relative to the sensitivity of the individual. We live in a world of color, sound, taste, and odor. But the world has color and sound only if the individual has normal vision and hearing. If we had other organs of taste and smell, the world would have other tastes and odors. We can readily conceive that if the structure of the retina were different the world would have an entirely different set of colors. We can live with a person who is color-blind without discovering that fact. He refers to certain colors, which exist for us as yellows, as reds. And there is no way of detecting this except by a set of colored yarns in the psychological laboratory by which you can find out that a certain color is different for him. Our world is relative to our own sensitivities. We can go back of those particular sensitivities to what we call the physical causes of those sensations, and we can, for example, identify different colors with certain rates of vibration which are not dependent upon our sensitivity. So we can go back to something which we assume to be there in independence of this relation to our eyes and ears. We feel hot and cold, and our theory is that there is simply a movement of molecules which are imperceptible to vision or feeling except in the sense of temperature. But motion is not the warmth that we feel, and the lack of motion is not the cold that we feel. We assume, also, that there is a world of physical things that have mass, that move, that have a certain shape and form-characteristics which Locke called the "primary qualities,'' while the secondary qualities admittedly belong only within our experience. But the former, too, can be stated in terms of our consciousness, as sensations, and as the images of those impressions which Locke called "ideas."
The result of the Humean skepticism, which was the natural
(37) product of this view, was to destroy the passage from a subjective world over to something outside. With this went all necessary science. Our concepts of the laws of causation, of substance and attribute, to mention only two, are found to be nothing but associations of ideas, in the Humean sense of that term. But science seems to dispute this, and Kant undertook to justify the approach of science. He insists that there is such a thing as science and such a thing as necessity. And he tries to find out how these are possible. We have, we will say, the statement of a straight line being the shortest distance between two points. Accept Euclid, and you have propositions starting off with certain axioms and reaching certain results. We accept these as necessarily true. Kant asks, How is this possible? He insists that we do accept them and that out of such propositions all our necessary sciences arise. His answer is that there are certain forms of the mind itself-for example, space with its structure, and time with its structure-so that that which takes place must occur according to the forms of that mind in which they appear. Mind, then, gives these forms and, to that extent, gives laws to nature. In this way Kant reached the same position in regard to nature at large that he reached in regard to human society, namely, that it is the mind that gives laws to nature. So we see again that he was the philosopher of revolution all the way around.
In the end the problem boils down to this: Is necessity possible within the world of experience? Hume says that causation, the supposed instance par excellence of necessity, must be considered as simply a set of relations between different experiences. Kant agrees that our world is made up of such experiences. But, from the fact that we do live in a world of experiences, Hume drew the conclusion that there could be no such things as laws of nature because the most famous of them all, that of causation, is nothing but a set of happenings, connections in our experience, in which one impression succeeds another according to our habit of expectation. That is, we say that we have always found that swans are white, and wherever
(38) we find the form of a swan we find the white color; so we lay down a law of nature that swans must be white. And then someone goes to Australia and finds black swans. All our laws of nature are nothing but certain uniform associations, certain experiences which are invariably connected with each other. There may be a succession which is contrary to that. This is what was found in a somewhat intricate sort of fashion in the case of observations recently made in regard to the position of stars during an eclipse. Light is susceptible to changes in direction. In so far as light offers such response to a change in direction, it has what the physicists call "mass." Now, mass can be measured in accordance with Newton's laws. The path of the light of a star passing the edge of the sun ought to be shifted a certain amount, depending upon the mass of the sun and the mass of the ray of light, and so forth. On the Newtonian basis, you can figure out how much it ought to be shifted. Einstein has another theory of gravitation. He says that the amount of the shift ought to be twice that predicted on the Newtonian theory. On observation, it was found that Einstein was right. The only facts that you have in this case are the position of the light of the star in its relation to the rim of the sun. By means of photography this can be measured. All facts, the so-called "data" of any subject, are nothing but certain experiences that the observer has in their relation to each other. The relation which is found at any given time on the basis of such investigations may be found to be all wrong a few generations later. In fact, we can be pretty sure this will happen. More recent theories of scientists have replaced older theories. Certain facts remain the same, but the theories have been replaced. Can there be any such thing as universality and necessity which belong to the laws of nature in a world which is a world of experience, a world of certain uniformities? You ask a scientist what a law of nature is, and he says it is nothing but a uniformity. But when you ask just where that uniformity is found, the answer is that it is found in the experience of men who observe. They have certain impressions, and they find
(39) that these are uniform. Can you have such a thing as universality and necessity under such a condition?
Hume says it is evident you cannot; your statement boils down to the fact that certain things happen and you cannot tell that others will not happen. But the fact that things have happened in a certain order forms in you and me the habit of expecting them to happen in that order. That is what the laws of nature-causation, for example-are. Now Hume described the world as a world of experience in which the so-called laws of nature are nothing but our habits of expecting things to happen in the future as they happened in the past. Berkeley accepted Locke and went him one better; Hume accepted Berkeley and went him one better; and Kant accepted Hume and went him one better, but along a little different line.
What Kant pointed out was that we have in the mathematical sciences results that are necessary and universal. Yet they belong to a world of experiences. We believe that the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, that seven and five make twelve. We believe these things, and, if other people did not, we should still continue to believe them; we should call the others irrational. Kant took the position that these things are necessarily true. But how can they be necessarily true? Kant's answer is that our minds give laws to nature. If there is only one mold in the pantry and you know that there will be pudding for supper, you know, a priori, that it will have a certain form. That is what Kant would call a piece of "transcendental logic." You know in advance what form the pudding must take because there is only one form available. You can give a law which will include all puddings that are to be as long as you can control the number of molds there are in the kitchen. Well, similarly, Kant said that what we call space and time are nothing but forms of our sensibilities. The experiences that we have, then, will take on the forms of space and time, and we can argue that all the experiences we can possibly have must take on those forms because they are the forms of the mind. And he also as-
(40) -serted that the mind-"judgment," as he called it-has certain other forms, which he called the "categories." The two most important - there were twelve altogether - are those of substance and causality. Anything that we sense in terms of space and time, because these are the forms of our sensibilities, we have to think of in terms of substance and attribute, and cause and effect. We think of them in terms of substance and causality as well as in terms of space and time because we cannot help it. The former are forms of the judgment; the latter are forms of the sensibilities.
Kant had another faculty, that of "reason," whose function was higher than either of the two mentioned. But all I am trying to do here is to point out the sense in which Kant could refer to the human mind as giving laws to nature. just as control over the molds can give laws of the form of puddings, so the forms of the mind can give laws to any experience which man may have. These laws are necessary and universal for all possible experiences. They do not go beyond experience, but they can give laws for all possible experiences. Thus Kant finds necessity and universality within the limits of a world of experience such as Hume had set up.
Kant's affirmations in regard to these forms of space and time have been somewhat shattered by the non-Euclidean geometries. He assumed that the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles and could not be otherwise. We know, of course, that a spherical triangle does not conform to this law. But we can say that he was not talking about a curved line triangle but of one composed of straight lines. But if the space on the surface of a sphere can be curved, why cannot all space be curved? In fact, we are living on the surface of a sphere. Our ancestors had to find out that we were not living on a plane. If a man at that time had followed the line of vision and kept on going until he came back to the point where he started, he would have been put up against it to explain it. Is there any reason why the space which is curved on the surface of the earth should not be curved throughout? One of the con-
(41) -ceptions given by mathematicians is that of a moving collection of planes, stacked up one on top of another. Suppose all those planes were curved ones, because we know certain geometries work out this way, then the axiom that parallel lines will not meet except at infinity has to be abandoned and we have different geometries based upon the theory that you can draw more than one line parallel to another.
Kant's supposition was that he could get hold of the forms of the mind in terms of which experience must be presented, and that, if he could, then he could give universal and necessary laws to nature. So, he conceived of man's mind as giving laws to nature itself. The starting-point was that man's nature is rational; therefore it can give laws to society, provided those laws expressed man's rights. He generalized this position and conceived of man as giving laws to nature as well as to society. He accepted Hume's statement that knowledge must lie within experience. But what he insisted upon was that there are necessary objects in experience, that there is universality in it. And he undertook to show, by a transcendental solution, how these things were possible. By "transcendental" Kant meant that he could form, in advance of an experience, a judgment as to what that experience could be. It was transcendent in the sense that it transcended the experience itself. His explanation of this was, as we have seen, that the mind had certain forms into which this experience must fall, so that one could be sure in advance that our experience would be subject to the structure and laws of space and time, because these were forms of our sensibility, and subject also to the categories of substance and attribute, of cause and effect, because these are forms of the judgment. We cannot think in other terms than these. Therefore, these forms are given in advance of experience, and they are necessarily given because everything that occurs in experience must take on these forms. The result of this process is what Kant would call an "object."
In this way Kant assumed that he had rescued science as a source of universal and necessary knowledge. We have geome-
(42) -try because the form of space is a form of the sensibility. We have laws of arithmetic because these are involved in the very order of succession as given in time. We have the laws of the understanding, those which give us substance and attribute, cause and effect, those which give us necessity and probability. These are what give us the universal and the particular. They are all forms of the understanding, and any experience which we have must take these forms. Of course, there is a large part of our experience which is contingent for us. That is we cannot tell, in advance, what colors, sounds, tastes, and odors we will have; but we do know in advance that, whatever particular ones they are, they must occur in a world of space and time, for nothing can appear outside these forms of the sensibility. We do not know, in advance, what the substantial character of an object will be; but we know that we cannot think except in terms of substance and attribute. We have to think of a thing as having substance; and its qualities, its characters, are attributes which inhere in that substance. We cannot tell in advance what the cause of an event will be, but we know in advance that every event must have some cause. So there is given to us in the very forms of the mind the necessity and universality of laws, particularly those of mathematics and of mathematical physics. And our empirical experience, the content of our sensuous experience, will all fall into these forms. But forms do not determine what the content will be. They determine how we shall experience that content when we do experience objects, but we cannot tell in advance what particular experience we shall have. We do know in advance what form it must take, because the forms of experience are given to the world by the mind itself. In that sense Kant could legitimately speak of the mind giving laws to nature as well as to society. We have already indicated how this later is accomplished through his carrying-out of the doctrine of Rousseau.
This notion of Kant's came back to a very subtle and somewhat obscure analysis of judgment. Kant asked why objects are units, and where that unity comes from. He ac-
(43) -cepted the Humean analysis of the object into its various elements. Take such an object as a tree or a house. You can analyze it into the different experiences you have. Color, feel, extension, all the different sensations are associated with each other; but the house or tree or animal is something more than a compiling of such impressions and images. It is a unit; it has a certain unity. A heap of sand has very little, if any, unity. Of course, you can regard it as a single thing, but you are more apt to consider it as a conglomeration of separate grains of sand. A house, however, has a perfectly definite unity. All the different parts belong together; they have a definite relationship to one another, a relationship which arises from the uses to which the house is put. An animal has a definite unity. It has varied organs, but all these are organized in the unity of its life-processes. It is a living thing in which all the parts have certain functions. Anv object that is a thing has a certain unity, and Kant's problem is to discover where that unity comes from. It is not a mere sticking-together of different pieces. If you break an object up into sensations and ideas and then stick them together by the law of association, you still do not get the unity of the object.
Now Kant could find only one source of unity in experience. He found this in the judgment, in the statement, "I judge that this is such and such a thing; this is a house." That is, one judges the house from the point of view of its uses. There are the dining-room, the kitchen, the bedrooms, the drawing-room, all looked at from the point of view of the processes of living. One sees house, thinks house, perceives house, in terms of the life that goes on in relation to it, just as one sees, perceives, and thinks an animal in terms of the life-processes that take place through all it-, organs. This unity is, a-, Kant insisted, something more than a mere association together of one experience after another. It is an organization, a holding-together of experiences within an experience of a certain form. We see that when we are confused by some object, when we cannot grasp what it is, cannot make any unity out of it, it is only a set of different
(44) sensations. Then suddenly we grasp its meaning and everything takes its place with reference to everything else. You can see what the organization is, what the purpose of it is, what the structure of it is. Well now, that grasping of these different elements, these different parts into a whole, as Kant conceived it , is an act of judgment. I judge this to be a table. I judge the object which I see outside the window to be a tree. I relate all the different parts of the object to each other, relate them in certain definite ways, spatially, temporally, in terms of substance and attribute, cause and effect. I organize these wholes in the process of my perceiving them. One of the experiments of the psychological laboratory is that of a dark box in which a spark is introduced so that suddenly when the spark is there you get a confused picture of something on the side of the box. Then the electric contact is made again and there is another spark, and you get a sense of structure. After a number of repetitions you see a perfectly distinct picture. You have organized what you see into the relations of a landscape, of a cathedral, or of a castle. You see it as a whole; you put it together. Our perception is just such a process as that. It is an organizing of the different elements of experience together. We get a clue to a thing; and then, as soon as we get that clue, things fall into their different relationships to each other.
Unity such as this, Kant said, is essentially that of judgment. It is found even in perception. We look at an object in the distance which is somewhat confused through the misty air, and, by putting our attention to it, we finally get an outline, such as a house; and then we can see it more clearly, grasp it for certain as a house. We are looking for the face of an acquaintance in a crowd, and we can finally identify it. There is the image which we have of that particular face. Our perception is a process of organizing different elements into a whole. It always has a certain sort of unity. And this is more than the mere sum of the parts. If you break up your perception into different elements like parts of a jig-saw puzzle and simply match them up together, you do not get a picture. You must get them organized
(45) in a certain way. Someone organizes the different notes in a melody, and we get the whole of the melody. One organizes the ideas which come, we will say, in an address which one is hearing; and they begin to take shape, they begin to have relationships to each other, and one gets the line of the argument. So, also, one gradually grasps the plot of a play he is seeing. Our knowledge is a process of relating different elements together and giving unity to them. That unity, in Kant's conception, comes back to the judgment as such.
Back of all perception, of all thought, of all conception, lies this high judge. As he did to most of his ideas, Kant gave a ponderous construction to this, calling it the "transcendental a priori unity of apperception." It is a priori because it is something which is given in advance of experience; it is transcendental because it is imposed on, and not derived from, experience-it is necessary. That is, our experience consists in judging. So far as it is an experience, it is an experience of things having a unity which does not come from the content but from the process of experiencing, as in perception and thought. It is something that is given in advance of the actual experience. We do not know what things we are going to see; but, if they are intelligible experiences, everything will have a certain unity which comes from our experiencing it. So, the transcendental unity of apperception, as Kant conceives it, is not simply the association of one sensation or image with another but the organization of them-of the appearance of a face into that of an acquaintance, of the dim outlines of an object into a house. It is more than perception, in the sense of having sensations. Our perception is a structure, and Kant called it "apperception."
Now this transcendental unity of apperception, Kant said, comes back to the fact of judgment, to an "I judge." Such an I or "ego" that judges is, as we have seen, transcendental , that is, something given in advance of perception. In Kant's earlier speculation he spoke of a transcendental self that he conceived of as being given in experience. But he was committed to find-
(46) -ing objects only in experience. Forms of experience could be given in advance, but they do not become an object until the latter actually appears in experience. Thus, this transcendental self was for Kant just a function of experience, not something actually given. The transcendental self was not a thing. The selves of our experience are empirical. We have certain feelings. We have certain memories. We have feelings of our bodies, the images we see of ourselves in the looking-glass. We have the experience of our relationships to others, family relationships, friendships, national relationships. All these just happen to us. They are empirical. They lie within experience. These selves are like other objects that appear in experience, tables, chairs, trees, and houses. They are empirical in character.
These empirical objects are there in experience, but they have reference to something beyond themselves. Such a thing as this table before me, Kant would say, just as it is, is made Lip out of our sensations and our memories of experiences we have had in the past of similar wooden surfaces. It is all organized together in the forms of space and time, that is, in the forms of our sensibilities; it is organized as substance. We will say that the wood is a substance and that it has certain qualities. One type of wood has one quality, and another type of wood has another quality. The wood has certain relations, and these we organize into a table. But we always imply that there is something which lies behind this actual experience which we have of the table. We have the actual experience of a table whenever we come into the room, and it ceases when we leave the room. We remember it and expect to have the same experience when we enter tile room again. We think of a something that does not get into experience, a something which is still there when we are out of the room. We think of something which transcends experience, something which Kant called a "thing-in-itself," a ding-an-sich; that something which is not in experience but which experience implies.
Our science gives us a "thing-in-itself," though not quite in the Kantian sense, of course. We think of the table as made up
(47) of molecules, of these molecules as made up of atoms, of atoms as made up of electrons and protons. We say that they are responsible for the different experiences we have. If they vibrate in a certain way, we get a certain color. Well, what about the ultimate particle itself, the electron? We go over to the physics laboratory and are shown a model of the atom, with protons and some electrons at the center. We think of atoms as little galaxies like the solar system, the sun represented by a proton at the center, and the planets by electrons revolving around the proton, little stellar groups. That is what goes to make Lip the atom. We think of them in terms of spatial relations and of the color which they have. But they cannot themselves have any color, for they are responsible for color. They could not be responsible for color and be colored themselves. The electron is too small to subtend a wave of light anyway. It could not be colored, and it is too small to be felt. Now, such objects could not possibly be experienced, and yet, in a certain sense they are the things -,-,,hich we do experience. A thing that could not possibly be experienced and yet is the thing that is experienced is what Kant called a "thing-in-itself." It is not dependent upon us for its existence. It is, rather, something upon which our experience may be thought to depend. We assume that there is a world of things-in-themselves and that they are not experienced -- in fact, they are supposed to be the conditions of experience. A world of things-in-themselves is implied in experience. But Kant insists that, inasmuch as they cannot be experienced, we cannot possibly know them. If we could know them, we would experience them, that is, they would fall under the forms of our sensibility and no longer be the conditions of experience. Color is a process of experience. All our knows; that knowledge is it process of experience. One says he knows; I means he is experiencing color, feeling, locality. If we experience the particles of which the physicist and chemist speak, those ultimate electrons or matter which lie beyond objects, we have to assume something which is responsible for that experience. A 11 thing-in-itself," says Kant, cannot be experienced; we cannot
(48) know it. We may assume such a "thing-in-itself," but that assumption cannot be an act of knowledge.
Kant accepted that position from Hume. You can have necessary knowledge in the world of experience itself. That is, you know that our experience must always take on the forms of space and time, of substance and attribute, cause and effect. But you cannot possibly know anything beyond that experience. You may have to postulate a world of things-in-themselves, but you cannot know such a world. This is the result of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. He analyzed experience, coming back to what was necessary and universal in it, that which made science possible.
But that holds only for experience. If the mind has such forms as those of which we have been speaking, then our experiences must take on these forms. Our judgments are judgments about past experiences, they are not judgments about a world which is the condition of our having experiences; we are assuming a world that we cannot possibly experience, and so one which we cannot know. We can give laws to the world of our experience, the laws of our own mind; but those laws hold only for experience, only for possible experience in the future. We can make a universal judgment that any experience we have must evidence these laws, but this judgment holds only for experience itself. We cannot know a world which lies outside of experience. Kant called this world of experience "phenomenal." It implies something beyond itself of which it is the appearance. Just as I have said, we can assume that the world has order, is the appearance of something. But of what it is the appearance we can never know. We cannot even know that there is anything there. We can postulate it, but we cannot know it.
But this postulation is something that takes us over into conduct. We are continually acting. Our experience has been of a world composed of seemingly solid matter; but we can analyze that into the space of sensibility. Our world is spatially organized; we find that organization is a form of the mind. It is a world in which there are uniformities; we find that those
(49) come back to the forms of cause and effect, and that is a law of the mind. We are postulating that experience will continue. We are putting our feet right into the future, so to speak. We are expecting that our experience will continue as it has continued. We know, or at least we assume, in advance that if experience continues it will be of a certain sort.
But will it continue? Is there a world of "things-in-themselves" that starts this experience of the world? What evidence is there for that? Kant says there is none. All our evidence holds simply for experience. We are asking for a world upon which experience depends. We will always postulate such a world; and we will always postulate that that world is intelligible, is intelligently organized, just as our experience is intelligently organized. Our conduct carries with it such a postulation as this: Our intelligent conduct will be justified by our later experience. But will we have further experiences? That is something we cannot tell, although we postulate possible experiences as having intelligent order.
What is more interesting from Kant's standpoint is that we postulate a responsibility on our own part for our own conduct. That is, we regard ourselves as responsible; and therefore we must postulate that we are free morally, that we can act as we feel we ought to act. Kant says we cannot prove that. In fact, when we look at our conduct, we always put it into terms of the law of cause and effect. We explain an act by saying that such and such motives were acting upon us. As we regard the act itself, we explain it, bring it under the law of cause and effect, and yet we continually accept the responsibility for our own conduct. And that acceptance of responsibility carries with it the postulate of freedom. If there is such freedom, it must not belong to this world of appearance, for, in it, ever), event is caused by a preceding event, comes under the law of cause and effect. If the self is responsible, it must be because that self is noumenal, a "thing-in-itself." Now we cannot know that. Kant says this reality belongs to a world which we cannot experience, a world which is responsible for our experience. But we are al-
(50) -ways making a postulate that we are responsible. Conduct carries with it a set of postulates which cannot be proved but which we cannot avoid. We also assume that the world of "things-in-themselves," which we cannot know, is an ordered intelligible world. Our very conduct carries that assumption with it. We cannot help assuming that we are responsible for our conduct , that we can act freely within our experience as such. Our conduct seems to be determined by previous events. If we can act freely, it must be because there are noumenal selves not bound by this law of understanding. We are always postulating that. In conduct we postulate selves which are noumenal, not phenomenal, selves that belong to the world of " things-in- themselves." We postulate that, just as we may say that scientists postulate electrons. The scientist can never get direct evidence of these in perception but, nonetheless, he assumes that there are such things. So we assume that there is such a thing as a self which is not bound to the law of cause and effect-a self which is responsible. This postulate of the self is involved in our action, in our conduct. It is something we cannot know, for knowledge is confined to experience. Experience is always of things that are caused, as such. But our conduct constantly postulates a free self. By way of this self, then, we go over to an assumed world of "things-in-themselves."
