to assert that the future of Poland now lay beyond the eastern frontier; his utterance was instantly silenced by a storm of abuse. A Moscow society had sent some rubles to Jaworski, leader of the Polish party in the Vienna Parliament, desiring him to forward them to the victims of Wreschen; almost on all sides he was assailed for not returning the money. And this hatred of Russia (and certainly of Germany no less) deepens as the national spirit grows stronger. There is no dream of making even a temporary alliance with either against the other; men may be diplomatic; nations cannot. Therefore,

judging from the past, men of foresight already begin to predict a cataclysm worse in its results to Poland than any of those which preceded it. This, however, the Conservative party, and all those who have anything to lose, will certainly avert if possible. Only those who have nothing are prepared to risk it.

The Polish question, then, even to men who know all that can be known, seems to be an insoluble problem. For the nation, aware of its great past, and of its present not quite bereft of a certain greatness, refuses either to die or to be assimilated, and will not in 1903, any more than in 1772, give up its claim to what is just to full and entire liberty. But those who enthralled her, on the other hand, dare neither destroy her nor set her free; and day by day they see assimilation farther off than in the days of Kosciuszko. Only two final solutions can be found to this problem-impossible solutions both. One is to be found in the words of Zamoyski, who, when the Governor of Warsaw, shortly before the rising of 1863, asked him what was to be done, curtly replied, 'Allez-vous-en.' The other would be to dig twenty millions of graves, shoot twenty millions of Poles, bury them, and have done with it. As matters stand, the question is still unsolved; and a population almost half as large as that of the United Kingdom lives and must live on in perpetual unrest and fermentation, not less disquieting than disquieted, ever growing in down-trodden strength. And all this is but the result of that first great act of injustice which was committed towards the close of the eighteenth century.

Art. V.--THE INFLUENCE OF KANT ON MODERN

THOUGHT.

1. Kants Gesammelte Schriften. Herausgegeben von der Königlich-Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin Reuther und Reichard, 1902.

2. Kant-Studien: Philosophische Zeitschrift. Bände I-XI. Herausgegeben von Dr Hans Vaihinger. Berlin: Reuther und Reichard, 1896-1904.

IN the history of human thought it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to say exactly when any new idea or tendency begins to operate. But if any modern writer has a claim to the German epithet 'epoch-making,' it is the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, the centenary of whose death fell on February 12, 1904. He it was who gave to the great questions of philosophy the form which they still retain; and he also indicated the principal lines of investigation in which the answers to these questions are still sought. On the other hand, if we go back beyond Kant, we find that the whole intellectual atmosphere has changed. The philosophical problem is stated in a different way; the solutions attempted are of another character. The philosophical situation of that time is well described by Kant himself. Two forms of dogmatism, an abstract materialism and an abstract spiritualism, contended with each other, and both were undermined by an equally abstract scepticism, which, if carried out consistently, would have been fatal to science as well as to metaphysics. The narrowness of these theories was mainly due to the individualistic presuppositions which were common to them all. The unreality of the Universal, except as the sum of the particulars, or at best as a common quality in them, was the tacit assumption of all philosophical writers. The thought of any unity in society which was more than an agreement between its members, or of any unity in the universe which was more than the action and reaction of its parts, was generally repudiated as mysticism or enthusiasm. Even Leibniz, who sought to find the universal in the individual, the principle of the whole in all the monads which were its parts, was driven to express this idea in the unsatisfactory form of a pre-established harmony; in other words, to treat the difference of individual things as real, and their

unity as only ideal; for each of the monads was conceived by him as representing all the others, from which, nevertheless, it was in existence entirely separated.

The result of this way of thinking was seen in the next generation. From the individualistic principles of Locke, Berkeley drew the conclusion that we know nothing directly except the states of our own consciousness; and Hume, following out the same logic, maintained that beyond these passing states we know nothing either of the self, the world, or God, though the action of association may give rise to beliefs which have the appearance of such knowledge. Thus mind was dissolved into the atomism of sensations, without any rational principle to organise them into the consciousness of an intelligible world. And if, in Germany, this conclusion was evaded by Wolff, who still maintained the spiritualism of Leibniz while emptying it of most of its speculative elements, yet the result was a worse than scholastic dogmatism, a philosophy of foregone conclusions, which proved nothing and explained nothing. For Wolff based the possibility of knowledge of the soul, the world, and God upon certain a priori principles which were independent of all experience, and could therefore neither be confirmed nor refuted by it. Indeed the very fact that the a priori or universal element of thought was absolutely separated from the particulars of sense tended to deprive both of all significance; for, as Kant was soon to declare, 'perceptions without conceptions are blind, and conceptions without perceptions are empty.' In other words, unconnected particulars have no meaning, and universals which are not principles of connexion have no content. Thus, on the one side, we have the dust and powder of individuality' and, on the other side, abstractions which have no relation to reality.

Now the epoch-making' significance of Kant's work lay in this, that, though his mind was deeply affected by dualism, and could never entirely escape from it, he yet revolted against it and endeavoured to bring the two terms together in a fruitful union. His philosophy, therefore, had a twofold direction, negative and positive. He had to show the futility of the dogmatism of Wolff, and yet to defend against Hume the validity of the universal principles that underlie all our knowledge or belief. And

he had to do both by showing that the elements, which lose all their meaning when separated, form, when united, a body of experience which is at once intelligible and, in a higher or lower sense, real. It is, indeed, just this reconstruction of an intelligible consciousness of the world as a whole, and this negation of imperfect theories which omit the one or the other element in it, which Kant expresses by the word criticism.' And his different 'Critiques' are only different stages in his long struggle to attain this object, to vindicate the universal as the principle of unity in our theoretical, practical, æsthetic, and religious consciousness, while acknowledging its impotence or imperfect validity when viewed as a mere abstraction and severed from its particular applications. Throughout he is attempting to distinguish between the elements in each of these forms which can be trusted and those which must be regarded as untrustworthy. And the result of his whole process of thought was, in the first place, to dismiss scepticism as irrational so far as it is directed against the empirical science and its methods. In the second place, it was to put out of court the dogmatic materialism and the dogmatic spiritualism of pre-Kantian philosophy, and that so decisively that neither has been advocated by any competent writer since Kant's day. Lastly, it was to concentrate the labours of speculative writers upon the ultimate problem of the possibility of the knowledge of that which transcends our immediate experience and cannot be verified by the ordinary methods of science; in other words, upon the nature and limits of our consciousness of the real, as distinguished from the phenomenal.

Now, starting from the work of Kant, there are three living movements of thought which correspond roughly with the three 'Critiques.' There is, first of all, what is called agnosticism, which differs from scepticism in that it maintains the validity of empirical science, while denying the possibility of any knowledge that goes beyond sensible experience. This attitude of thought may be regarded as the direct result of the 'Critique of Pure Reason,' both in its positive and in its negative aspect, in its defence of mathematical and physical science against Hume, and in its polemic against the metaphysic of Wolff. In the second place, there is a

school of philosophers, perhaps the most popular school at the present time, which admits that absolute truthtruth as to all reality which is not phenomenal-is inaccessible to science, but which maintains that the idea of such reality is necessary to the human mind, and that it finds its verification in the moral consciousness; since the moral consciousness compels us to postulate God, freedom, and immortality as the fundamental presuppositions of our practical life. This view can obviously be shown to be derived from Kant, and particularly from the Critique of Practical Reason.' Lastly, there are many writers who maintain that the problem of philosophy can only be solved by a thorough-going idealism, which breaks down the Kantian division between thought and knowledge, between faith and reason, or reduces it to a division, not of kinds, but of stages of knowledge. Such writers hold that the absolute reality reveals itself in our actual experience, at least for one who carries that experience back to its ultimate principles; and that the conceptions which Kant regards as transcendent ideas, or practical postulates, may be brought within the sphere of knowledge. It is obvious that any one who holds this view goes beyond the strict limits of the Kantian philosophy. But he may maintain that he does so only by going a step farther in the direction of those modifications of Kant's own theory which are admitted into the last of his Critiques,' the Critique of Judgment.' Perhaps, therefore, the simplest and most illuminating way in which we can treat of the influence of Kant will be to show how he has contributed to each of these movements, and to attempt to answer the following questions. How, and how far, does Kant supply a rational basis for agnosticism? How, and how far, does he succeed in proving that the practical reason restores our faith in the reality of those objects which he holds to be beyond knowledge? And, lastly, how, and how far, does he prepare the way for the doctrine that the division between faith and knowledge is a relative one, and that ultimately the rational or intelligible is also the real-a doctrine which was ostensibly developed out of Kant's philosophy by his idealistic successors.

First, then, agnosticism-as the doctrine that we can