GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

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* ETHICS
properties derived from the human mind. These properties
the human mind has imposed upon it in the process
of knowing it. Examples tif such properties are those of
quality and quantity, the property of being the cause of
something and the effect of something else, and the pro-
perties of being in space and in time. As a consequence,
we never know anything as it really is; we only know it as
it appears*
Tp this extent everybody is enclosed within the horizon
ofan environment which his own mind has at least partially
constructed. Outside this environment, he can know
nothing, since in the very act of trying to know it he would
impose upon it the categories of his mind, and so bring
within the circle of his self-made world that which he was
trying to know. The word "know" is, however, in this
connection, to be interpreted in a limited sense as denoting
what philosophers call more technically cognition, that is,
to say, knowledge of things, ideas and truths. It stands for
the activity of the mind's strictly intellectual faculties, but
it by no means covers all its faculties. In particular, it does
not cover the moral faculty. Now moral experience,
Kant maintains, is itself a kind of knowledge, for we know
in moral experience, and know quite indubitably, what we
ought to do whether we in fact do it or not, and, in s6 far
as we have this moral knowledge, we make contact, in
Kant's view, with the world of things as they really are.
Moral experience is, therefore, for Kant, of the greatest
metaphysical significance, since it and it alone provides
for human consciousness a way out of the limiting circle
of the world of things as they appear to us, and into the
world of things as they really are.
Kant's Psychological Theory.
Kant's reasons for at-
tributing to the moral faculty this peculiar significance
are briefly as follows. He divides man's psychological
faculties into three main groups, the senses, the intellect,
and die will. The senses and the intellect are, as I have
said, precluded from a direct knowledge of reality by their