The Kantian Centennial [pp. 394-424]

THE ~A N TIAN CEN TENNIA L.
an original capacity to develop themselves under favoring circumstances into new forms of being and even into thinking
agents. Moreover, when these atoms rise to the dignity of
thinking agents, they not only begin themselves to geometrize,
but they assume, by an enormously comprehensive synthetic
judgment apriori, that the Eternal Force which animates the universe has geometrized from the beginning of the nebular accre;tions. If also we know him as Force, tho we know nothing more
of him, we must know this at least a priori, that he is a causative agent and acts according to law, and law implies at least
number and measure. If also there has been development and
evolution from the beginning, then we are forced to interpret
this all-pervasive and all-explaining relationship by a plan of
progress vast enough to include every description of successive
phenomena, and enduring enough to cover every step and stage
of manifestation from the simplest to the most complex of events.
4 The strength and consistency of Kant's position in
respect to the a priori element in knowledge as a product is
strikingly contrasted with the weakness and vacillation of his
views of the nature and authority of knowledge as an act. "In
analyzing human knowledge as a product without reference to
the agent, he shows beyond question that it must imply axioms
or a priori truths. In criticising the power in man by which this
act is produced he concedes that much if not all which is thus
assumed as true by him may not be real in fact. This results
from the want of clearness which we have already noticed in his
conception of the critical process, by which he at one time tries
the product and at another confounds and blends the two. It
is not surprising that the operator or analyst should fail in using
the instrument the nature of which he fails fully to define.
One or two examples will illustrate our meaning. Kant
distinguishes three several capacities and modes of knowledge:
(I) Intuition in the two forms of the outer and inner sense; (2)
Thought or judgment giving concepts or generalized attributes
or relations; (3) The reason giving the ideas of the soul, the
kosmos, and God. It is in the analysis of sense-perception that
he conspicuously brings our confidence in the act of knowledge
into suspicion and distrust. While he finds here two space and
time relations as a priori elements, and proves them to be such
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