KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (q.v.), and, less accurately, the developments of that phil osophy by Kant's followers.
Pre-critical.—In any complete account of the Kantian sys tem it is necessary that there should be constant reference, on the one hand, to the peculiar character of the preceding 18th-century philosophy, and, on the other hand, to the problems left for re newed treatment to more modern thought. Fortunately the de velopment of the Kantian system itself furnishes such treatment as is necessary of the former reference. For the critical philosophy was a work of slow growth. In the early writings of Kant we are able to trace with great definiteness the successive stages through which he passed from the notions of the preceding philosophy to the new and comprehensive method which gives its special char acter to the critical work. Scarcely any great mind, it has been said with justice, ever matured so slowly. In the early essays we find the principles of the current philosophies, those of Leibniz and English empiricism, applied in various directions to those problems which serve as tests of their truth and completeness; we note the appearance of the difficulties or contradictions which manifest the one-sidedness or imperfection of the principle applied ; and we can trace the gradual growth of the new concep tions which were destined, in the completed system, to take the place of the earlier method. To understand the Kantian work it is indispensable to trace the history of its growth in the mind of its author.
Of the two preceding stages of modern philosophy, only the second, that of Locke and Leibniz, seems to have influenced prac tically the course of Kant's speculation. With the Cartesian movement as a whole he shows little acquaintance and no sym pathy, and his own philosophic conception is never brought into relation with the systematic treatment of metaphysical problems characteristic of the Cartesian method. The fundamental ques tion for philosophic reflection presented itself to him in the form which it had assumed in the hands of Locke and his successors in England, of Leibniz and the Leibnizian school in Germany. The transition from the Cartesian movement to this second stage of modern thought had doubtless been natural and indeed necessary. Nevertheless the full bearings of the philosophic question were somewhat obscured by the comparatively limited fashion in which it was then regarded. The tendency towards what may be tech
nically called subjectivism, a tendency which differentiates the modern from the ancient method of speculation, is expressed in Locke and Leibniz in a definite and peculiar fashion. However widely the two systems differ in details, they are at one in a certain fundamental conception which dominates the whole course of their philosophic construction. They are throughout individual ist, i.e., they accept as given fact the existence of the concrete, thinking subject, and endeavour to show how this subject, as an individual conscious being, is related to the wider universe of which he forms part.
In dealing with such a problem, there are evidently two lines along which investigation may proceed. It may be asked how the individual mind comes to know himself and the system of things with which he is connected, how the varied contents of his experi ence are to be accounted for, and what certainty attaches to his subjective consciousness of things. Regarded from the individual ist point of view, this line of inquiry becomes purely psychological, and the answer may be presented, as it was presented by Locke, in the fashion of a natural history of the growth of conscious ex perience in the mind of the subject. Or, it may be further asked, how is the individual really connected with the system of things apparently disclosed to him in conscious experience? what is the precise significance of the existence which he ascribes both to himself and to the objects of experience? what is the nature of the relation between himself as one part of the system, and the sys tem as a whole? This second inquiry is specifically metaphysical in bearing, and the kind of answer furnished to it by Leibniz on the one hand, by Berkeley on the other, is in fact prescribed or determined beforehand by the fundamental conception of the individualist method with which both begin their investigations. So soon as we make clear to ourselves the essential nature of this method, we are able to discern the specific difficulties arising in the attempt to carry it out systematically, and thus to note with precision the special problems presented to Kant at the outset of his philosophic reflections.