It is somewhat surprising that the Critique of Judgement has never
yet been made accessible to the English reader. Dr. Watson has indeed
translated a few selected passages, so also has Dr. Caird in his
valuable account of the Kantian philosophy, and I have found their
renderings of considerable service; but the space devoted by both
writers to the Critique of Judgement is very small in comparison
with that given to the Critiques of Pure and Practical Reason. And
yet the work is not an unimportant one. Kant himself regarded it as
the coping-stone of his critical edifice; it even formed the point
of departure for his successors, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, in the
construction of their respective systems. Possibly the reason of
its comparative neglect lies in its repulsive style. Kant was never
careful of style, and in his later years he became more and more
enthralled by those technicalities and refined distinctions which deter
so many from the Critical Philosophy even in its earlier sections.
These “symmetrical architectonic amusements,” as Schopenhauer called
them, encumber every page of Kant’s later writings, and they are a
constant source of embarrassment to his unhappy translator. For, as
every translator knows, no single word in one language exactly covers
any single word in another; and yet if Kant’s distinctions are to be
preserved it is necessary to select with more or less arbitrariness
English equivalents for German technical terms, and retain them all
through. Instances of this will be given later on; I only remark
here on the fact that Kant’s besetting sin of over-technicality is
especially conspicuous in this treatise.