In order, now, that we may bring the very elaborate framework of the Kantian philosophy into a clearer outline, let us briefly glance at its fundamental conceptions, and notice its chief principles and results. Kant subjected the activity of the human mind in knowing, and the origin of our experience, to his critical investigation. Hence his philosophy is called critical philosophy, or criticism, because it aims to be essentially an examination of our faculty of knowledge; it is also called transcendental philosophy, since Kant calls the reflection of the reason upon its relation to the objective world, a transcendental reflection (transcendental must not be confounded with transcendent), or, in other words, a transcendental knowledge is one “which does not relate so much to objects of knowledge, as to our way of knowing them, so far as this is apriori possible.” The examination of the faculty of knowledge, which Kant attempts in his “_Critick of Pure Reason_,” shows the following results. All knowledge is a product of two factors, the knowing subject and the external world. Of these two factors, the latter furnishes our knowledge with experience, as the matter, and the former with the conceptions of the understanding, as the form, through which a connected knowledge, or a synthesis of our perceptions in a whole of experience first becomes possible. If there were no external world, then would there be no phenomena; if there were no understanding, then these phenomena, or perceptions, which are infinitely manifold, would never be brought into the unity of a notion, and thus no experience were possible. Thus, while intuitions without conceptions are blind, and conceptions without intuitions are empty, knowledge is a union of the two, since it requires that the form of conception should be filled with the matter of experience, and that the matter of experience should be apprehended in the net of the understanding’s conceptions. Nevertheless, we do not know things as they are in themselves. _First_, because the categories, or the forms of our understanding prevent. By bringing that which is given as the material of knowledge into our own conceptions as the form, there is manifestly a change in respect of the objects, which become thought of not as they are, but only as we apprehend them; they appear to us only as they are transmuted into categories. But besides this subjective addition, there is yet another. _Secondly_, we do not know things as they are in themselves, because even the intuitions which we bring within the form of the understanding’s conceptions, are not pure and uncolored, but are already penetrated by a subjective medium, namely, by the universal form of all objects of sense, space and time. Space and time are also subjective additions, forms of sensuous intuition, which are just as originally present in our minds as the fundamental conceptions or categories of our understanding. That which