KAN'TIAN PHILOS'OPHY, (known also by the name of the Critical Philoso phy,) a system which owes its existence to Immanuel Kant, professor of logic and metaphysics in the university of Konigs berg in the latter half of the 18th cen tury. The promulgation of Kant's doc trines forms a very marked era in the history of philosophy. Our limits will prevent us from giving an explanation of this system in any degree adequate to its importance. We must confine our selves to a brief outline of its leading features. At the time when Kant com menced his metaphysical labors the phil osophical world was divided between the sensualism of the French followers of Locke on the one hand, and the dogmatic rationalism of the disciples of Wolf and Leibnitz on the other. The former, by a species of analytical legerdemain, re solved all our mental powers into modifi cations of sense ; while the letter, in an equally indiscriminating spirit, though with far more laudable intentions, sought to construct a system of real truth out of the abstract conceptions of the under standing. Against both of these school: Kant declared pen warfare. Witlulnitv ing himself from all ontological speenbt Hon, he sought, by a stricter analysis of our intellectual powers, to ascertain the possibility and to determine the limits of human knowledge. He divides the speculative part of our nature into three great provinces—sense, understanding, and reason. Our perception of the out ward world is representative merely : of things as they are in themselves it affords us no notices. In order to render human experience possible, two ground-forms, under which all sensible things aro con templated, are assumed—time and space. To these he assigns a strictly subjective reality. The truth of the fundamental axioms of geometry rests on the necessity and universality of our intuitions of space in its three dimensions—intuitions which are not derived from any one of our senses, or from any combinations of them, but lie at the ground and are the condition of all sensible human experience. The understanding, or the faculty which com bines and classifies the materials yielded by sense, Kant subjects to a similar analy sis. All its operations are generalized
into four fundamental modes or forms of conception ; which, after the example of Aristotle, he names categories. These are four in number : 1. Quantity, includ ing unity, multeity, totality ; 2. Quality divided into reality, negation, and limita tion ; 3. Relation, viz. substance and acci dent, cause and effect, action and reac tion ; and 4. Modality, also subdivided into possibility, existence, and necessity. These form, as it were, the moulds in which the rude material of the senses is shaped into conceptions, and becomes knowledge properly so called. The cate gories in themselves are the subjeet-mat ter of logic, which is so far forth a pure science, determinable a priori. The third and highest faculty, the reason, consists in the power of forming ideas—pure forms of intelligence, to which the sensi ble world has no adequate correspondents. Out of these ideas no science can be formed ; they are to be regarded as regu lative only, not as constitutive. The ex istence of God, immortality, freedom, are the objects after which the reason is perpetually striving, but concernidg which it can deeide• nothing either one way or the other. Thus for Kant's sys tem may be regarde I as one of pure skepticism. The deficiencies of our spec ulative reason he conceives to be supplied by the moral faculty, to which he has given the name of practical reason, the object of which is to determine, not what is. but what ought to be As the former determines the form of our knowledge, so the latter prescribes the form of our action. Obligation is not a more feeling; it has a. pure form under which the reason is compelled to regard human conduct. The personality of man, which lies at the ground of speculative knowledge, becomes, in relation to action, freedom of the will. It is in our moral nature that we must seek for the only valid foundation of the oolief in God, the immortality of the soul, and a future state in which the demands of the practical reason shall be realized.