In any detailed exposition of the critical system it would be
requisite in the first place to state with some fullness the precise
nature of the problems immediately before Kant, and in the second
place to follow with some closeness the successive stages of the
system as presented in the three main works, the _Kritik of Pure
Reason_, the _Kritik of Practical Reason_ and the _Kritik of
Judgment_, with the more important of the minor works, the _Metaphysic
of Nature_ and the _Metaphysic of Ethics_. It would be necessary,
also, in any such expanded treatment, to bring out clearly the Kantian
classification of the philosophical sciences, and to indicate the
relation between the critical or transcendental investigation of the
several faculties and the more developed sciences to which that
investigation serves as introduction. As any detailed statement of the
critical system, however compressed, would be beyond the limits of the
present article, it is proposed here to select only the more salient
doctrines, and to point out in connexion with them what advance had
been effected by Kant, and what remained for subsequent efforts at
complete solution of the problems raised by him. Much that is of
interest and value must necessarily be omitted in any sketch of so
elaborate a system, and for all points of special interpretation
reference must needs be made to the many elaborate dissertations on or
about the Kantian philosophy.
The doctrine from which Kant starts in his critical or transcendental
investigation of knowledge is that to which the slow development of
his thought had led him. The essence of cognition or knowledge was a
synthetic act, an act of combining in thought the detached elements of
experience. Now synthesis was explicable neither by reference to pure
thought, the logical or elaborative faculty, which in Kant's view
remained analytic in function, nor by reference to the effects of
external real things upon our faculties of cognition. For, on the one
hand, analysis or logical treatment applied only to objects of
knowledge as already given in synthetic forms, and, on the other hand,
real things could yield only isolated effects and not the combination
of these effects in the forms of cognitive experience. If experience
is to be matter of knowledge for the conscious subject, it must be
regarded as the conjoint product of given material and synthetic
combination. Form and matter may indeed be regarded separably and
dealt with in isolation for purposes of critical inquiry, but in
experience they are necessarily and inseparably united. The problem of
the _Kritik_ thus becomes for Kant the complete statement of the
elements necessarily involved in synthesis, and of the subjective
processes by which these elements are realized in our individual
consciousness. He is not asking, with Locke, whence the details of
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