KANT, Immanuel, one of the greatest of modern philosophers: b. Konigsberg, Eastern Prussia, 22 April 1724; d. there, 12 Feb. 1804. His father, who spelled his name Cant, was a poor saddler, and was said to be of Scottish origin, though this is denied by some authori ties. Kant was educated in his native city at the Collegium Fredericianum and the univer sity. After the completion of his studies at the university in 1746, he was a tutor in pri vate families until 1755, when he became a teacher in the university. He did not receive a professorship, however, until 1770, when he was appointed to the chair of logic and meta physics. In 1797 he retired from teaching. In the university he lectured at first on mathe matics and physics in addition to the various philosophical subjects, and later added courses on physical geography and anthropology, lec turing also occasionally on pedagogy. He was small and weak physically; but by imposing upon himself a strict regimen he was able to accomplish a vast amount of work, and to live to be 80 years of age.
Kant's Critical Philosophy is contained in his three Critiques —'Kritik der reinen Ver nunft' (1781) of Pure Reason, most important of all)) ; (Kritik der practischen Ver nunft' (17::) ((Critique of Practical Reason)), and (Kritik der Urtheilskraft) (1790) ( (Criti que of In these works Kant passed beyond the Rationalism (q.v.) of Wolff, in which he had been educated, and the Em piricism (q.v.) of Hume (q.v.): to which he had for a time been inclined, and originated the transcendental method of philosophy. For him there is no knowledge without experience; but experience is a compound, and implies not only a matter given in sensation, but also forms and principles of arrangement and synthesis which come from the mind. Experience gets its char acter from the knowing mind, and to under stand the objects of ordinary experience it is necessary to know what forms and principles the mind employs in constructing them. Kant's transcendental inquiry, then, asks what the na ture of the mind must be, our experience being as it is. He finds that experience can be under stood only on the assumption that the mind has certain a priori forms and principles which belong to its very nature. These Kant calls transcendental elements of experience, and the procedure by means of which he attempts to diicover these and demonstrate their applica tion in experience he names a transcendental method of inquiry. It is necessary carefully to distinguish Kant's use of `transcendental' from what he calls °transcendent.* As we have seen, transcendental elements do not themselves de pend upon experience, but belong to the mind as the forms and principles which all experi ence presupposes, and through which alone it is possible. The transcendent, on the other hand, is that which lies beyond the sphere of all possible experience, and consequently ,that which can never be known. Kant's purpose in the 'Critique of Pure Reason' is at once to dis cover the transcendental forms of experience, and thus justify its validity, and to criticize and overthrow the false pretense of knowledge which professes to deal with transcendent ob jects. With respect to the first of these pur poses Kant's undertaking was epoch-making, for he introduced a change in the point of view which he himself likens to that which Coper nicus effected in astronomy. Whereas it had previously been held that the object had a fixed form and constitution which the mind in know ing had to passively copy, Kant teaches that objects to be known at all must conform to the concepts and principles of the knowing intelli gence. In order to understand the nature of
experience, then, it is necessary to ask what are the mind's ways of knowing, and what are the a priori forms and concepts under which it brings objects? In answering this question Kant makes a sharp division between percep tive knowledge and knowledge gained through concepts. It is true that he goes on to break down the grounds for this distinction by show ing that neither perception nor thought can give knowledge apart from the other,— that "concepts without perceptions are empty, and perceptions without concepts are blind.* Never theless, he himself always maintains this dual ism in the constitution of experience. The transcendental basis of each form of knowledge is therefore investigated under a separate di vision of Kant's work, that of Perception in the 'Transcendental Aesthetic,' and that of conceptual experience in the 'Transcendental Analytic.' In Perception the transcendental forms are found to be space and time. Space and time are not objective entities existing apart from the mind; nor are they concepts or general ideas. Kant shows that perceptive ex perience such as ours is only possible if we regard space and time as belonging to the mind as forms of perceptive arrangement. Space and time do not belong to objects in themselves, therefore, apart from their being known, but are the universal forms under which all per ceptive experience is known. But, for experi ence, objects must be thought as well as per ceived. That is to say, what we call experience is not a mere series of perceptively arranged objects, but a unity whose parts have been systematized by thought in accordance with certain principles or points of view which it supplies. These transcendental principles, or points of view, Kant calls the Categories of the Understanding. Since to think is to judge in order to discover the complete list of catego ries he falls back upon Aristotle's classification of judgments under the headings of Quantity, Quality, Relation and Modality. To each of these general divisions again three categories belong, so that Kant presents his list of 12 categories with a great show of system and completeness, which however has no real war rant. Apart from the fact that there are sev eral obvious repetitions and some omissions in the list, Kant does not find any organic rela tion between the different categories, such as might be shown to exist, for example, by exhib iting them as successive stages in the evolution of thought. It is true that Kant telli us that all of the categories are subordinated to the central unity of consciousness, the ((transcen dental Ego* or atranscendental unity of Apper ception,* but he never explains concretely the relation of the various categories to each other and to this unity. The °transcendental Ego,* the supreme category, is not a thing or an un changing soul-substance, but an immanent and ever active principle of organization. It is impossible to make an object of it, or to de scribe it as something existing by itself ; for it exists only in relation to experience. It is at once the presupposition and the necessary cor relate of a coherent and unitary experience of objects, a universal principle, not a particular substance.