difference between a vibration and a sensation; and again between a succession or agglomeration of the sensations of yellowness, softness, sweetness, and roundness, and what we mean when we speak of an orange! The nerves may vibrate for ever -what would that be to us? The sensations might rush in for ever through the different gates of our senses, the afferent nerves might deliver them to one central point, yet even then they would remain but so many excitations of nervous action, so many sensations, coming and going at pleasure, but they would never by themselves alone produce in us the perception of an orange. The common-sense view of the matter is that we perceive all these sensations together as an orange, because the orange, as such, exists without us as something substantial, and the qualities of yellowness, softness, sweetness, and roundness are inherent in it. This is, no doubt, very unphilosophical, and ignores the positive fact that all that we have consists and can consists only of sensations and phases of consciousness, and that nothing can ever carry us beyond. Yet there is this foundation of truth in the common-sense view, that it shows our utter inability of perceiving any sensations without referring them to something substantial which causes them, and is supposed to possess all those qualities which correspond to our sensations. But if we once know that what is given us consists only of phases of sensation, whatever their origin may be, it then becomes clear that it can only be our Self, or whatever else we like to call it, which adds all the rest, and does this, not consciously or deliberately, but of necessity, and, as it were, in the dark. We cannot receive sensations without at once referring them to a substantial cause. To say that these sensations may have no origin at all, would be to commit an outrage against ourselves. And why? Simply because our mind is so constituted that to doubt whether anything phenomenal had a cause would be a logical suicide. Call it what you like, a law, a necessity, an unconscious instinct, a category of the understanding, it always remains the fault of our Self, that it cannot receive sensations without referring them to a substance of which they are supposed to tell us the attributes.* *Cf. Bacon, Nov. Org. I. 41. Omnes perceptiones, tam Sensus quam Mentis, sunt ex analogia Hominis, non ex analogia universi. Estque In And if this is so, we have a clear right to say with Kant, that that without which even the lowest perception of an object is impossible must be given, and cannot have been acquired by repeated perception, The premiss in this argument, viz. that what we mean by cause has no warrant in the Non-ego, is indeed accepted, not only by Kant, but also by Hume; nay, there can be no doubt that on this point Kant owed very much to Hume's scepticism. Kant has nothing to say against Hume's argumentation that the ideas of cause and effect, of substance and quality, in that sense in which we use them, are not found in actual experience. But while Hume proceeded to discard those ideas as mere illusions, Kant, on the contrary, reclaimed them as the inevitable forms to which all phenomena must submit, if they are to be phenomena, if they are to become our phenomena, the perceptions of a human Self. He established their truth, or, what with him is the same, their inevitability in all phenomenal knowledge, and by showing their inapplicability to any but phenomenal knowledge, he once for all determined the limits of what is knowable and what is not. These inevitable forms were reduced by Kant to twelve, and he arranged them systematically in his famous Table of Categories:— (1) Unity, Plurality, Universality; (2) Affirmation, Negation, Limitation; (3) Substantiality, Causality, Reciprocity; (4) Possibility, Reality, Necessity. There is no time, I am afraid, to examine the true character of these categories in detail, or the forms which they take as schemata. What applies to one applies to all, viz. that without them no thought is possible. Take the categories of quantity, and try to think of anything without thinking of it at the same time as one or many, and you will find it is impossible. Nature does not count for us, we must count ourselves, and the talent of counting cannot have been acquired by counting, any more than a stone acquires the talent of swimming by being thrown into the water. Put in the shortest way, I should say tellectus humanus instar speculi inaequalis ad radios rerum, qui suam naturam Naturae rerum immiscet, eamque distorquet et inficit.'—Liebmann, Kant, p. 48. that the result of Kant's analysis of the Categories of the Understanding is, 'Nihil est in sensu, quod non fuerit in intellectu. We cannot perceive any object, except by the aid of the intellect. It is not easy to give in a few words a true abstract of Kant's philosophy, yet if we wish to gain a clear view of the progressive, or, it may be, retrogressive, movement of human thought from century to century, we must be satisfied with short abstracts, as long as they contain the essence of each system of philosophy. We may spend years in exploring the course of a river, and we may have in our notebooks accurate sketches of its borders, of every nook and corner through which it winds. But for practical purposes we want a geographical map, more or less minute, according to the extent of the area, which we wish to survey; and here the meandering outline of the river must vanish, and be replaced by a bold line, indicating the general direction of the river from one important point to another, and nothing else. The same is necessary if we draw, either for our own guidance or for the guidance of others, a map of the streams of philosophic thought. Whole pages, nay, whole volumes, must here be represented by one or two lines, and all that is essential is that we should not lose sight of the salient points in each system. It has been said that every system of philosophy lies in a nutshell, and this is particularly true of great and decisive systems. They do not wander about much; they go straight to the point. What is really characteristic in them is the attitude which the philosopher assumes towards the old problems of the world: that attitude once understood, and everything else follows almost by necessity. In the philosophy of Kant two streams of philosophic thought, which had been running in separate beds for ages, meet for the first time, and we can clearly discover in his system the gradual mingling of the colors of Hume and Berkeley. Turning against the onesided course of Hume's philosophy, Kant shows that there is something in our intellect which could never have been supplied by mere sensations; turning against Berkeley, he shows that there is something in our sensations which could never have been supplied by mere intellect. He maintains that Hume's sensations and Berkeey's intellect exist for each other, depend 1 on each other, pre-suppose each other, form together a whole that should never have been torn asunder. And he likewise shows that the two factors of our knowledge, the matter of our sensations on one side, and their form on the other, are correlative, and that any attempt at using the forms of our intellect on anything which transcends the limits of our sensations is illegal. Hence his famous saying, Begriffe ohne Anschauungen sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind. (Conceptions without Intuitions are empty, Intuitions without Conceptions are blind.') This last protest against the use of the categories with regard to anything not supplied by the senses, is the crowning effort of Kant's philosophy, but, strange to say, it is a protest unheeded by almost all philosophers who follow after Kant. To my mind Kant's general solution of the problem which divided Hume and Berkeley is perfect; and however we may criticise the exact number of the inevitable forms of thought, his Table of Categories as a whole will for ever remain the Magna Charta of true philosophy. In Germany, although Kant's system has been succeeded by other systems, his reply to Hume has never been challenged by any leading philosopher. It has been strengthened rather than weakened by subsequent systems which, though widely differing from Kant in their metaphysical conceptions, never questioned his success in vindicating certain ingredients of our knowledge as belonging to mind, not to matter; to the subject, not to the object; to the understanding, not to sensation; to the à priori, not to experience. They have disregarded Kant's warning that à priori laws of thought must not be applied to anything outside the limits of sensuous experience, but they have never questioned the true à priori character of those laws themselves. Nor can it be said that in France the step which Kant had made in advance of Hume has ever been retraced by those who represent in that country the historical progress of philosophy. One French philosopher only, whose position is in many respects anomalous, Auguste Comte, has ventured to propose a system of philosophy in which Kant's position is not indeed refuted, but ignored. Comte did not know Kant's philosophy, and I do not think that it will be ascribed to any national prejudice of mine if I consider that this alone would be sufficient to exclude his name from the historical roll of philosophers. I should say just the same of Kant if he had written in ignorance of Locke and Hume and Berkeley, or of Spinoza if he had ignored the works of Descartes, or of Aristotle if he had ignored the teaching of Plato. It is different, however, in England. Here a new school of British philosophy has sprung up, not entirely free, perhaps, from the influence of Comte, but supported by far greater learning, and real philosophical power-a school which deliberately denies the correctness of Kant's analysis, and falls back in the main on the position once occupied by Locke or Hume. This same school has lately met with very powerful support in Germany, and it might seem almost as if the work achieved by Kant was at last to be undone in his own country. These modern philosophers do not ignore Kant, but in returning to the standpoint of Locke or Huine, they distinctly assert that Kant has not made good his case, whether in his analysis of the two feeders of knowledge, or in his admission of general truths, not attained and not attainable by experience. The law of causality on which the whole question of the à priori conditions of knowledge may be said to hinge, is treated again, as it was by Hume, as a mere illusion, produced by the repeated succession of events; and psychological analysis, strengthened by physiological research, is called in to prove that mind is but the transient outcome of matter, that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. No phosphorus, no thought! is the triumphant war-cry of this school. In speaking of the general tendencies of this school of thought, I have intentionally avoided mentioning any names, for it is curious to observe that hardly any two representatives of it agree even on the most essential points. No two names, for instance, are so frequently quoted together as representatives of modern English thought, as Mr. Stuart Mill and Mr. Herbert Spencer, yet on the most critical point they are as diametrically opposed as Hume and Kant. Mr. Stuart Mill admits nothing à priori in the human mind; he stands on the same point as Locke, nay, if I interpret some of his paragraphs rightly, he goes as far as Hume. Mr. Herbert Spencer, on the contrary, fights against this view of the human intellect with the same sharp weapon that Kant had used against them, and he arrives, like Kant, at the conclusion that there is in the human mind, such as we know it, something à priori, call it intuitions, categories, innate ideas or congenital dispositions, something at all events that cannot honestly. be explained as the result of individual experience. Whether the prehistoric genesis of these congenital dispositions or inherited necessities of thought, as suggested by Mr. Herbert Spencer, be right or wrong, does not signify for the purpose which Kant had in view. In admitting that there is something in our mind which is not the result of our own'à posteriori experience, Mr. Herbert Spencer is a thorough Kantian, and we shall see that he is a Kantian in other respects too. If it could be proved that nervous modifications, accumulated from generation to generation, could result in nervous structures that are fixed in proportion as the outer relations to which they answer are fixed, we, as followers of Kant, should only have to put in the place of Kant's intuitions of Space and Time, 'the constant space relations, expressed in definite nervous structures, congenitally framed to act in definite ways, and incapable of acting in any other way.' If Mr. Herbert Spencer had not misunderstood the exact meaning of what Kant calls the intuitions of Space and Time, he would have perceived that, barring his theory of the prehistoric origin of these intuitions, he was quite at one with Kant. Some of the objections which Mr. Herbert Spencer urges against Kant's theory of innate intuitions of Space and Time were made so soon after the appearance of his work, that Kant himself was still able to reply to them.* Thus he explains himself that by intuitions he does not mean anything innate in the form of ready-made ideas or images, but merely passive states or receptivities of the Ego, according to which, if affected in certain ways, it has certain forms in which it represents these affections, and that what is innate is not the representation itself, but simply the first formal cause of its possibility. Nor do I think that Kant's view of cau *See Das Unbewusste, p. 187, Kant's Werke, ed. Rosenkranz, B. 1, pp. 445, 446. sality, as one of the most important categories of the understanding, has been correctly apprehended by his English critics. All the arguments that are brought forward by the living followers of Hume, in order to show that the idea of cause is not an innate idea, but the result of repeated observations, and, it may be, a mere illusion, do not touch Kant at all. He moves in quite a different layer of thought. That each individual becomes conscious of causality by experience and education, he knows as well as the most determined follower of Hume; but what he means by the category of causality is something totally different. It is an unconscious process which, from a purely pyschological point of view, might truly be called prehistoric. So far from being the result of repeated observations, Kant shows that what he means by the category of causality is the sine quâ non of the simplest perception, and that without it we might indeed have states of feeling, but never a sensation of something, an intuition of an object, or a perception of a substance. Were we to accept the theory of evolution which traces the human mind back to the inner life of a mollusc, we should even then be able to remain Kantians, in so far as it would be, even then, the category of causality that works in the mollusc, and makes it extend its tentacles towards the crumb of bread which has touched it, and has evoked in it a reflex action, a grasping after the prey. In this lowest form of animal life, therefore, the category of causality, if we may use such a term, would show itself simply as conscious, or, at all events, as no longer involuntary, reaction; in human life, it shows itself in the first glance of recognition that lights up the infant's vacant stare. This is what Kant means by the category of causality, and no new discoveries, either in the structure of the organs of sense or in the working of the mental faculties, have in any way, so far as I can see, invalidated his conclusions that that category, at all events, whatever we may think of the others, is à priori in every sense of the word. Among German philosophers there is none so free from what are called German metaphysical tendencies as Schopenhauer yet what does he say of Kant's view of causality? 'Sensation,' he says, 'is something essentially subjective, and its changes are brought to our cognizance in the form of the internal sense only, therefore in time, i.e. in succession.* The understanding, through a form belonging to it and to it alone, viz. the form of causality, takes hold of the given sensations, à priori, previous to all experience (for experience is not yet possible), as effects which, as such, must have a cause; and through another form of the internal sense, viz. that of space, which is likewise pre-established in the intellect, it places that cause outside the organs of sense.' And again: As the visible world rises before us with the rising of the sun, the understanding, by its one simple function of referring all effects to a cause, changes with one stroke ali dull and unmeaning sensations into intuitions. What is felt by the eye, the ear, the hand, is not intuition, but only the data of intuition. Only by the step which the understanding makes from effect to cause, the world is made, as intuition, extending in space, changing in form, permanent in substance; for it is the understanding which combines Space and Time in the conception of matter, that is, of activity or force.' Professor Helmholtz, again, who has analysed the external apparatus of the senses more minutely than any other philosopher, and who, in England, and, at all events, in this Institution, would not be denied the name of a philosopher, arrives, though starting from a different point, at identically the same result as Schopenhauer. 'It is clear,' he says, 'that starting with the world of our sensations, we could never arrive at the conception of an external world, except by admitting, from the changing of our sensations, the existence of external objects as the causes of change; though it is perfectly true that, after the conception of such objects has once been formed, we are hardly aware how we came to have this conception; because the conclusion is so self-evident that we do not look upon it as the result of a conclusion. We must admit, therefore, that the law of causality, by which from an effect we infer the existence of a cause, is to be recognized as a law of our intellect, preceding all experience. We cannot arrive at any experience of natural objects without having the law of causality acting within us; it is impossible, therefore, to admit that this law of causality is derived from experience.' Liebmann, Objectiver Anblick, p. 114. Strengthened by such support from opposite quarters, we may sum up Kant's argument in favor of the transcendental or à priori character of this and the other categories in this short sentence: 'That without which no experience, not even the simplest perception of a stone or a tree, is possible, cannot be the result of repeated perceptions.' There are those who speak of Kant's philosophy as cloudy German metaphysics, but I doubt whether they have any idea of the real character of his philosophy. No one had dealt such heavy blows to what is meant by German metaphysics as Kant; no one has drawn so sharp a line between the Knowable and the Unknowable; no one, I believe, at the present critical moment, deserves such careful study as Kant. When I watch, as far as I am able, the philosophical controversies in England and Germany, I feel very strongly how much might be gained on both sides by a more frequent exchange of thought. Philosophy was far more inter national in the days of Leibniz and Newton, and again in the days of Kant and Hume; and much mental energy seems wasted by this absence of a mutual understanding between the leaders of philosophic thought in England, Germany, France, and Italy. It is painful to read the sweeping condemnation of German metaphysics, and still more to see a man like Kant lectured like a schoolboy. One may differ from Kant, as one differs from Plato or Aristotle, but those who know Kant's writings, and the influence which he has exercised on the history of philosophy, would always speak of him with respect. The blame, however, does not attach to the English side only. There are many philosophers in Germany who think that, since the days of Hume, there has been no philosophy in England, and who imagine they may safely ignore the great work that has been achieved by the living representatives of British philosophy. I confess that I almost shuddered when in a work by an eminent German professor of Strassburg, I saw the most advanced thinker of England, a mind of the future rather than of the present, spoken of as— antediluvian. That antediluvian philosopher is Mr. John Stuart Mill. Antediluvian, however, was meant only for AnteKantian, and in that sense Mr. Stuart Mill would probably gladly accept the name. Yet, such things ought not to be: if nationality must still narrow our sympathies in other spheres of thought, surely philosophy ought to stand on a loftier pinnacle. -Fraser's Magazine. CHAPTER I. SOME ONE PAYS. "BRINDISI, August. "DEAR HARRY, Our plans are all formed. We start from this on Tuesday for Corfu, where we have secured a small cutter of some thirty tons, by which we mean to drop down the Albanian coast, making woodcocks our object on all the days pigs do not offer. We are four-Gerard, Hope, Lascelles, and myself-of whom you know all but Lascelles, but are sure to like when you meet him. We want you, and will take no refusal. Hope declares on his honor that he will never pay you a hundred you lent him if you fail us; and he will-which is more remarkable stillbook up the day you join us. Seriously, however, I entreat you to be one of us. Take no trouble about guns, &c. We are amply provided. We only ask yourself. "Yours ever, GEORGE OGLE. "If you cannot join at Corfu, we shall rendezvous at Prevesa, a little town on the Turkish side, where you can address us, to the care of the Vice-consul Lydyard." This note reached me one day in the late autumn, while I was sojourning at the Lamm, at Innspruck. It had followed me from Paris to Munich, to Baden, the Ammergau, and at last overtook me at Innspruck, some four weeks after it had been written. If I was annoyed at the delay which lost me such a pleasant companionship, for three of the four were old friends, a glance at the postscript reconciled me at once to the disappointment - Prevesa, and the name Lydyard, awoke very sad memories; and I do not know what would have induced me to refresh them by seeing either again. It is not a story, nor is it a scene, that I am about to relate. It is one of those little incidents which are ever |