The necessary revolution in man's thinking after Immanuel Kant

effort to clear up these doubts of his, to find an answer to that problem in all its ramifications. The problem was: how the system of basic assumptions on which the science of that era rested was to be reconciled with his growing conviction that every one of these assumptions was questionable. In other words Kant felt that the science of which Galileo and Newton were the pillars and in which he too had already distinguished himself—sharing with Laplace the credit for the famous nebular theory—imperatively needed rescuing from the corrosive effects of Hume’s critical empiricism.

While, therefore, as a scientist he seemed willing to go on accepting the dogmatic assumptions on which the natural sciences of the day were based, he was on the other hand alive to the cogency of Hume’s more up-to-date empiricism, which took the form of a critical scepticism.

This contradictory pair of basic positions, the dogmatic and the sceptical, rested on a corresponding pair of metaphysical premises which have now to be clearly stated.

The underlying premise of the dogmatic position was the conception of an absolutely objective world of external reality, rational in its inner structure and existing quite independently of any finite mind: moreover such a mind, or subject, could at most apprehend it, not contribute anything of his own to it. This is the external world of Newton and Galileo, a world looked at from a mental standpoint that we may call objectivist. The sceptical position, on the other hand, is based on the opposite assumption, that is, on the acceptance of a subjective consciousness that creates its Own cognitive experience, and makes itself into a completely independent metaphysical entity. Here the private, individual consciousness is represented as being the only source of the ideas we have concerning an external reality, but as to what that real world actually is in itself and how it is constituted we can have nothing whatever to say, because any indications that may reach us concerning it come to us through sensations aroused in us, and all these are purely subjective and personal. This way of regarding the external world, then, presupposes a subjectivist standpoint.

The dogmatists are faced with the obligation, firstly, to justify this assertion, and secondly, to explain how our subjective experience can correspond with this external reality in such a

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