The Kantian Centennial [pp. 394-424]

THE KA N TIA N CEN TENNIAL.
surer steps in paths which he would thereby have made easier
for others to follow. Certainly his English readers, who know
little of metaphysics except as approached from the side of
Pyschology, would have found less difficulty in understanding
his meaning and in accepting many of his principles. It is pertinent to observe at this point that Locke's Essay is as truly and
professedly a critical inquiry into the reach and authority of the
human understanding as was Kant's "Critique of the Pure Rea son." We can hardly say that it is much less philosophical or
more psychological in its discussions. We should remember,
however, in comparing the two, that the one treatise was published nearly a century before the other. It is not strange that
the second should be more exact and profound than the first,
and as a philosophical treatise should immeasurably surpass it.
It is to be regretted, however, that in some respects at least it
should lack the directness and naturalness both of its psychological method and its philosophical treatment.
3. We come next to one of the grandest features of Kant's
"Critique;" viz., his demonstration of the presence of an a priori
element in human knowledge-not in scientific knowledge only,
but in knowledge of every kind. The problem itself is as old as
philosophy. By few however, if by any, has it been conceived so
distinctly and stated so forcibly as by Kant, in the elucidation
of the question whether the mind can attain to synthetical propositions apriori, and, if so, under what conditions and by what
authority. It was true this was none other than the old contrast so sharply but imaginatively made by Plato between
az'-Oz5 and E7zrariju?, i.e., sense knowledge and knowledge
by ideas, and also by Aristotle between matter and form.
Even Locke could not escape the recognition of it with all the
earnestness with which he combats the doctrine of innate ideas,
and refers all human acquisitions to his two sources of human
experience; viz., the inner and outer sense, or sensation and reflection. It is only charitable to conclude that when Locke wrote
in his second book of relations and in his fourth of the nature of
knowledge, in both of which he unwittingly introduces a third kind
and source of knowledge, he had forgotten what he had written
perhaps ten years previously about the only two possible sources
and kinds of the same, in the two forms of inner and outer experi
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