The necessary revolution in man's thinking after Immanuel Kant

to his discovery that we create it, through a mental operation that every one of us necessarily carries out at every moment of our lives, and the working principles of which he attempted to describe.

We shall be going on shortly to see, in conclusion, how far these Kantian principles have been found applicable in recent anthropological researches. Meanwhile there is just one further question on which something must be said. By limiting the scope of possible knowledge to the world of phenomena, Kant ruled out the possibility of our knowing anything at all about certain principles which in traditional philosophy were basic: namely, the soul, as an entity having substance; Nature, as consisting of matter external to us and existing independently of us; and God—for each of these transcends the realm of experience. The problems that arise concerning these three traditional ideas are dealt with in the last part of “The Critique of Pure Reason’, the Transcendental Dialectics. In this part Kant severely criticises the pretensions of traditional philosophy to reaching any knowledge of these ideal principles as existent realities; and he exposes the contradictions inherent in the traditional thought processes aimed at achieving such knowledge. Yet his criticism, as we shall see, is not purely destructive. Even if these ‘ideas of pure reason’, he says, cannot be known through the means and modes proper to knowledge concerning phenomena, they still have to be accepted —as norms regulating the use we make of our intellectual concepts, which constitute scientific knowledge. Only by accepting the validity of these regulative ideas—the soul, Nature and Godis it possible for man to interpret the natural order teleologically, that is, as expressing an order or realm of ends, through which alone an ethical view of life is possible. And since an ethical view of life is indisputably a reality in some sense, a reality that we necessarily experience, this shows that those ideas, although not defensible on the plane of theory, have to be accepted on the plane of practice. As norms of the human understanding, the soul, Nature and God cease to be logically self-contradictory and become indispensable factors contributing to the moral life.

The fact that there is such a thing as the moral life with its own characteristic form—and this is an unquestionable fact of our experience—proves conclusively that the ideas of pure reason are

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