THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

201?
THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
an examina-
away.*' 14 The Critique becomes a detailed biology of thought,
tion of the origin and evolution of concepts, an analysis of the inherited
structure of the mind. This, as Kant believes, is the entire problem of
metaphysics. "In this book I have chiefly aimed at completeness; and I
venture to maintain that there ought not to be one single metaphysical
problem that has not been solved here, or to the solution of which the
key at least has not here been supplied." 13 Exegi rnonumentum aere
perennius! With such egotism nature spurs us on to creation.
The Critique comes to the point at once. is "Experience by no means
the only field to which our understanding can be confined. Experience
tells us what is, but not that it must be necessarily what it is and not
otherwise. It therefore never gives us any really general truths; and our
reason, which is particularly anxious for that class of knowledge, is
roused by it rather than satisfied. General truths, which at the same time
bear the character of an inward necessity, must be independent of experience,
clear and certain in themselves." 16 That is to say, they must
be true no matter what our later experience may be; true even before
experience; true a priori. "How far we can advance independently of all
experience, in a priori knowledge, is shown by the brilliant example of
mathematics." 17 Mathematical knowledge is necessary and certain; we
cannot conceive of future experience violating it. We may
believe that
the sun will "rise" in the west to-morrow, or that some day, in some con-
ceivable asbestos world, fire will not burn stick; but we cannot for the
life of us believe that two times two will ever make anything else than
four. Such truths are true before experience; they do not depend on
experience past, present, or to come. Therefore they are absolute and
necessary truths; it is inconceivable that they should ever become untrue.
But whence do we get this character of absoluteness and necessity? Not
from experience; for experience gives us nothing but separate sensations
and events, which may alter their sequence in the future.18 These truths
derive their necessary character from the inherent structure of our minds,
from the natural and inevitable manner in which our minds must operate.
For the mind of man (and here at last is the great thesis of Kant) is not
passive wax upon which experience and sensation write their absolute
and yet whimsical will; nor is it a mere abstract name for the series or
group of mental states; it is an active organ which moulds and coordinates
sensations into ideas, an organ which transforms the chaotic
multiplicity
of experience into the ordered unity of thought.
But how?
^Critiqu* of Pure Reason, pref. p. xxlv.
"Ibid., p. xxiii. "Ibid., p. i.
17
P. 4.
^"Radical empiricism" (James, Dewey, etc.) enters the controversy at this point,
and argues, against both Hume and Kant, that experience gives us relations and
sequences as well as sensation and events.