The Equinox (Volume I, Number II)

THE EQUINOX it is interesting reading, which is more than we can say of most recent works dealing with the Kénigsberg philosopher; except, however, two, which, as it happens, are also written by soldiers, viz., Captain William Bell McTaggart’s “Absolute Relativism,” and Captain J. F. C. Fuller’s “Star in the West.” This work, however, more than these two, which only deal with Kant en passant, shows him to be, as we have always considered him, the wild Irish- man of Teutonic thought, who recklessly gallops at the philosophic hurdles set up by the seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century philosophers, Some of these he clears skilfully enough, others he crashes through and shouts @ priori, little seeing that these innate intuitions of his are but abstractions from experience—‘ inherited experiences,” as Herbert Spencer has since shown—without furthering the solution of the problem “ What is Existence ?” In fact, in many ways Kant may be said to be the eighteenth-century Spencer, and much more so than Spencer can be said to be the nineteenth- century Kant. He succeeded Berkeley and Hume, just as Spencer succeeded Hegel and Fichte ; but, like the great transfigured realist, only ultimately and unconsciously to be overthrown by the very questions he fondly imagined he had explained away. Nevertheless he answered these questions so astutely that it has taken the whole of the nineteenth century to explain what he meant! This Major Kelly indirectly, if not directly, points out by attempting to rectify the Transcendental A®sthetics Analytic and Dialectic by the critical and idealistic pantheism of Schopenhauer. Interesting as this is, it would have indeed added further to the value of this little book had Major Kelly added a chapter dealing with the philosophy of Kant from to-day’s critical standpoint, instead of halting with Schopenhauer’s extension of the same, Had he done so he would scarcely have asserted, as he does (or is it Kant or Schopenhauer ?), that from the law of Causality results the important a priori corollary “ that Matter can neither be created nor destroyed” (p. 35). If, however, it can be destroyed, as Gustave le Bon has attempted to prove, what becomes of the a priority of Causality? Nay, further, of the a priority of the Transcendental Esthetic itself{—of Time and of Space, the fundamental sensual perceptions of Kant’s system ? Must we agree with the learned author of “The Star in the West,” that Kant, after having for a hundred years lost his way in “the night of Hume’s ignorance,” has at length fallen victim to his own verbosity, and has indeed sadly scorched “his fundamental basis ” ? THE LITERARY GUIDE AND RATIONALIST REVIEW, 1908-9. Monthly, 2d. Of all the lame ducks that crow upon their middens under the impression that they are reincarnations of Sir Francis Drake, I suppose that the origin-of- religion lunatics are the silliest, 386