To take Kant’s criticisms of Berkeley more in detail. In the first
edition of the _Critique_[610] Kant passes two criticisms, without,
however, mentioning Berkeley by name: first, that he overlooks the
problem of time, and, like Descartes, ascribes complete reality to the
objects of inner sense. This is the cause of a second error, namely,
that he views the objects of outer sense as mere illusion (_blosser
Schein_). Proceeding, Kant argues that inner and outer sense are really
in the same position. Though they yield only appearances, these
appearances are conditioned by things in themselves. Through this
relation to things in themselves they are distinguished from all merely
subjective images. Berkeley is again referred to in the fourth
_Paralogism_.[611] His idealism is distinguished from that of Descartes.
The one is dogmatic; the other is sceptical. The one denies the
existence of matter; the other only doubts whether it is possible to
prove it. Berkeley claims, indeed, that there are contradictions in the
very conception of matter; and Kant remarks that this is an objection
which he will have to deal with in the section on the _Antinomies_. But
this promise Kant does not fulfil; and doubtless for the reason that,
however unwilling he may be to make the admission, on this point his own
teaching, especially in the _Dialectic_, frequently coincides with that
of Berkeley. So little, indeed, is Kant concerned in the first edition
to defend his position against the accusation of subjectivism, that in
this same section he praises the sceptical idealist as a “benefactor of
human reason.”
“He compels us, even in the smallest advances of ordinary
experience, to keep on the watch, lest we consider as a well-earned
possession what we perhaps obtain only in an illegitimate manner.
We are now in a position to appreciate the value of the objections
of the idealist. They drive us by main force, unless we mean to
contradict ourselves in our commonest assertions, to view all our
perceptions, whether we call them inner or outer, as a
consciousness only of what is dependent on our sensibility. They
also compel us to regard the outer objects of these perceptions not
as things in themselves, but only as representations, of which, as
of every other representation, we can become immediately conscious,
and which are entitled outer because they depend on what we call
‘outer sense’ whose intuition is space. Space itself, however, is
nothing but an inner mode of representation in which certain
perceptions are connected with one another.”[612]