stance. But at no time could I believe, that in itself and essentially it is incompatible with religion, natural or revealed: and now I am most thoroughly persuaded of the contrary. The writings of the illustrious sage of Koenigsberg, the founder of the Critical Philosophy, more than any other work, at once invigorated and disciplined my understanding. The originality, the depth, and the compression of the thoughts; the novelty and subtlety, yet solidity and importance of the distinctions; the adamantine chain of the logic; and I will venture to add-(paradox as it will appear to those who have taken their notion of Immanuel Kant from Reviewers and Frenchmen)—the clearness and evidence, of the Critique of the Pure Reason; and Critique of the Judgment; of the Metaphysical Elements of Natural Philosophy; and of his Religion within the bounds of Pure Reason, took possession of that is, Vindication of Great Men unjustly branded; and at such times the names prominent to my mind's eye have been Giordano Bruno, Jacob Behmen, Benedict Spinoza, and Emanuel Swedenborg." Still it was Mr. Coleridge's ultimate opinion, that Spinoza's system excluded or wanted the true ground of faith in God as the Supreme Intelligence and Absolute Will, to whom man owes religious fealty. He speaks thus in The Friend, vol. iii. Essay xi. p. 214, 5th edit. "The inevitable result of all consequent reasoning, in which the intellect refuses to acknowledge a higher or deeper ground than it can itself supply, and weens to possess within itself the centre of its own system, is—and from Zeno the Eleatic to Spinoza, and from Spinoza to the Schellings, Okens, and their adherents of the present day, ever has been-pantheism under one or other of its modes, the least repulsive of which differs from the rest, not in its consequences, which are one and the same in all, and in all alike are practically atheistic, but only as it may express the striving of the philosopher himself to hide these consequences from his own mind." S. C.] t E me as with a giant's hand." After fifteen years familiarity with them, I still read these and all his other productions with undiminished delight and increasing admiration. The few passages that remained obscure to me, after due efforts of thought, (as the chapter on original apperception,18) and the apparent contradictions which occur, I soon found were hints and insinuations referring to ideas, which KANT either did not think it prudent to avow, or which he considered as 17 [The Critique of the pure Reason, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, occupies vol. ii. of the collective edition of the works of Kant in ten vols. Leipzig, 1838. It first appeared in 1781. The Critique of the Judgment, Kritik der Urtheilskraft, 1790, is contained in vol. vii. The Met. El. of N. Philosophy, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft, 1786, may be found in vol. viii. at p. 439. Religion within the bounds of pure Reason-Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blosen Vernunft, 1793, in vol. vi. p. 159. Immanuel Kant was born at Koenigsberg in 1724, was appointed Rector of the University there in 1786, after having declined repeated offers from the King of Prussia, of a Professorship in the Universities of Jena, Erlangen, Mittau, and Halle, with the rank of privy counsellor; and died at his native place, nearly 80 years old, Feb. 12, 1804. S. C. The following note is pencilled in Mr. C's copy of Schelling's Philosophische Schriften, but the date does not appear. "I believe in my depth of being, that the three great works since the introduction of Christianity are,-Bacon's Novum Organum, and his other works, as far as they are commentaries on it:-Spinoza's Ethica, with his Letters and other pieces, as far as they are comments on his Ethics: and Kant's Critique of the Pure Reason, and his other works as commentaries on, and applications of the same." Ed.] 18 [Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Transfc. Elementarlehre II. Th. 1. Abth. I. Buch. 2. Hauptst. 2. Abschn. Transfc. Deduction der reinen Verstandesbegriffe. § 16 Von der ursprünglichsynthetischen Einheit der Apperception. Works, Leipzig, 1838, vol. ii. p. 129. Apperception is treated of, or referred to generally, throughout the division of the work entitled Transcen consistently left behind in a pure analysis, not of human nature in toto, but of the speculative intellect alone. Here therefore he was constrained to commence at the point of reflection, or natural consciousness while in his moral system he was permitted to assume a higher ground (the autonomy of the will) as a postulate deducible from the unconditional command, or (in the technical language of his school) the categorical imperative, of the conscience. He had been in imminent danger of persecution during the reign of the late king of Prussia, that strange compound of lawless debauchery and priest-ridden superstition: and it is probable that he had little inclination, in his dental Deduction of the pure conceptions of the Understanding, ending at p. 153. Apperception is thus defined by Dr. Willich, in his Elements of the Critical Philosophy, p. 143. Apperception or Consciousness, or the faculty of becoming conscious, signifies 1. In general, the same as representation, or the faculty of representing: 2. In particular, the representation as distinct from the subject that represents, and from the object that is represented. 3. Self-consciousness, for which we have two faculties, a. The empirical, the internal sense, i. e. the consciousness See also Nitsch's General and Introductory View of Professor Kant's Principles, a very clear summary, pp. 111-113. S. C.] old age, to act over again the fortunes, and hair-breadth escapes of Wolf.19 The expulsion of the first among Kant's disciples, who attempted to complete his system, from the University of Jena, with the confiscation and prohibition of the obnoxious work by the joint efforts of the courts of Saxony and Hanover, supplied experimental proof, that the venerable old man's caution was not groundless. In spite therefore of his own declarations, I could never believe, that it was possible for him to have meant no more by his Noumenon, or Thing in itself, than his mere words express; or that in his own conception he confined the whole plastic power to the forms of the intellect, leaving for the external cause, for the materiale of our sensations, a matter without form, which is doubtless inconceivable.20 19 [Christian Wolf, the most celebrated supporter of the school of Leibnitz, was born at Breslau in 1679. In 1707 he became Professor of Mathematics at Halle; was accused of atheism by his envious colleagues, was driven from his employ by their cabals in 1723, and went to teach at Marburg, as Professor of Philosophy; he was afterwards honourably recalled to Halle in 1740, and died at that town, April 9, 1754. From Victor Cousin's Manuel de l'Histoire de la Philosophie, II. 173-4. S. C.] 20 [Transfc. Id. P. 114. The reader may compare this passage with Schelling's remarks on the doctrine of Kant, in the third tract of the Phil. Schrift. pp. 275-6, the title of which has already been given, and to which Mr. C. himself refers his readers in chap. xii. In the Introduction to the Ideen, Schelling says of the Kantian philosophy, on this particular point, that, as acute men have objected, "it makes all conceptions of cause and effect arise in our mind,-in our representations alone; and yet the representations themselves again, according to the law of causality, operate upon us through outward things." Note at p. 10. Thus the Idealism of Berkeley deprives us of Nature (or an objective world) altogether, giving us, instead of it, a seeming I entertained doubts likewise, whether, in his own mind, he even laid all the stress, which he appears to do, on the moral postulates.21 An idea, in the highest sense of that word, cannot be conveyed but by a symbol; and, except in geometry, all symbols of necessity involve an apparent contradiction.22 Φώνησε συνετοῖσιν: and for those who could not pierce through this symbolic husk, his writings were not intended. Questions which cannot be fully answered without exposing the respondent to personal danger, are not entitled to a fair answer; and copy of such a world in each individual mind:-the Idealism of Kant-(too literally understood on one point,)-leaves us Nature, but reduces her to a blank,-an unseen cause of all we see without us, although cause, by his own showing, exists only within us:-the system of Locke cuts Nature in two-lets her retain one half of her constituent properties, while it makes her but the unknown cause in us of the other half:-the Scotch system, (in the opinion of the Transcendentalist,) equally with the two last mentioned, cuts us off from Nature while it brings Nature to bear upon us as closely as possible; it affirms an evident absurdity, and calls it a hidden mystery; it tries to be cautious, yet is incautious enough to assume the whole matter in debate, namely, that the objective and the subjective systems are distinct from, and extrinsic to, one another; it teaches us to escape from a difficulty by shutting our eyes: but eyes were made to be open and not to be shut,-except for the sake of rest; when we unclose them again there is the same difficulty, staring us full in the face. S. C.] 21 [Kant's doctrine on this head is fully explained in his Foundation for the Metaphysique of Morals, first published in 1785, and Critique of the Practical Reason-1788. Works, vol. iv. S. C.] 22 ["Now this supersensuous ground of all that is sensuous, Kant symbolized by the expression things in themselves—which, like all other symbolic expressions, contains in itself a contradiction, because it seeks to represent the unconditioned through a conditioned, to make the infinite finite." Abhandlungen. Phil. 1rift. pp. 276-7. S. C.] |