The necessary revolution in man's thinking after Immanuel Kant

way as would justify us in calling it knowledge. But as the sceptics are also subjectivists they are no better able than their opponents to explain how any knowledge of the external world is possible. For when once a person has, hypothetically at least, shut himself up in solitary confinement within his own ego, he is no longer in a position to show convincingly how he can possibly get out and, somehow or other, make contact with the outside world again, so as to survive in it.

Here, then, we have a situation of complete deadlock, and a pretty pair of failures, contrasting rather comically with the everyday experience of ordinary commonsense man, who proves quite conclusively that we are solving this problem, in practice, every moment of our lives, without bothering in the least about these difficulties that the philosophers have got themselves into. They, poor fellows, as the history of philosophy consistently shows, can only manage to get over their difficulties and confusions by calling in some principle of transcendence, ideal or divine, in the role of a deus ex machina, to ensure that the necessary relations between subjective knower and objective thing known are conveniently patched up.

So Kant found himself in a self-contradictory situation, which was borne in upon him as an intimate personal experience; and to work out a solution to that fundamental contradiction became the problem which occupied him for the rest of his life. He found that, precisely formulated, the problem was this: how is it possible to explain the cognitive activity without resorting to some transcendent entity as an expedient? He saw that modern science had to be accepted, for there were its results to prove its validity; but he also saw that the metaphysical premises on which research was based were flimsy and illusory. What he set himself to do, therefore, was to prove the absolute validity of the scientific way of thinking, without having to seek refuge in dogmatically assuming the existence of an external world rational in itself; and in this way to render scientific thought impregnable to the attacks of sceptical criticism. But in order to do this, he had to find a new point of view from which to regard the act of cognition, on which science depends—some point of view other than the two traditional ones: the dogmatic position, that was wide open to the attacks of the sceptics, and the sceptical, which leads