renders the exercise of the faculty easy and natural with respect to them, and causes them to be called innate. It is no naked faculty, consisting in the mere possibility of understanding them: there is a disposition, an aptitude, a preformation, determining our mind and making it possible that they should be drawn forth from it. Just as there is a difference between the figures given to stone or marble indifferently, and those that its veins mark out already or are disposed to mark out if the workman takes advantage of them.' Farther on, to the objection that there is a difficulty in conceiving a truth to be in the mind, if the mind has never thought of it, he adds: It is as if one said that there is difficulty in conceiving veins to be in the marble before they are discovered.' In these sentences Leibnitz's theory is nearly completed.

After Leibnitz has next to be noticed KANT; but his contribution to the history of the present question, as before in the case of Descartes, cannot be viewed apart from his general philosophical position. Although his whole system, on the speculative side at least, may be described as a theory of the Origin of Knowledge, it cannot be properly understood without some preliminary reference to other lines of thought.

1. Kant found himself unable to subscribe to the metaphysical dogmatism of the school of Wolff (joining on to Leibnitz) that presumed to settle everything without any question of the mind's ability to pronounce at once and finally. This on the one hand: on the other he was startled by the scepticism of Hume (joining on through Berkeley to Locke) with its summary assertion of the impotence of human thought. As between the two, he conceived the idea of instituting a critical inquiry into the foundations and limits of the mind's faculty of knowledge; in his famous work, ‘The Critique of the Pure Reason' (1781).

2. As here implied in the word 'pure' used of Reason, or the general faculty of knowing, he contended for the inherence in the mind, before all experience, of certain principles of knowledge, which he called à priori; and thus far was at one with former supporters of Innate Ñotions. Farther, with Leibnitz in particular, he agreed in taking necessity and universality as the marks or criteria of cognitions never to be attained to or explained by experience. Cognitions universally and necessarily true, and these not merely analytic or verbal (where the predicate only sets forth the implication of the subject), but synthetic or real (in which there is an extension of knowledge) he found, as he thought, existing in abundance: in Mathematics such, for instance, as 7+5=12; Two straight lines cannot enclose a space, &c.; in Pure Physics, The quantity of matter in nature is constant, Action and Reaction in nature are equal; while the whole of traditional Metaphysics was made up of such. Criticism of the foundations and limits of human knowledge took with him, then, the special shape of an inquiry into the conditions of the possibility of synthetic cognitions à priori.

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3. In the peculiar solution that he gave of the old question of Innate Knowledge put into this new form, there can be traced the influence Hume had upon him from the opposite camp. Hume had meanwhile analyzed Causality into mere custom of sequence among the impressions of sense, and upon the untrustworthiness of such a purely subjective notion had based his general scepticism. Kant taking his stand upon the body of established mathematical truth (synthetic at the same time as necessary), rejected the sceptical conclusion; but accepting the subjective origin of the notion of Causality, proceeded to place all the native à priori, or non-empirical elements of knowledge in certain subjective or mental Forms' destined to enfold, while requiring to be supplemented by the Matter' of Experience.

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4. The mind, therefore, in Kant's view, has no sort of knowledge antecedent to and independent of experience, as many philosophers have more or less boldly asserted; it has, before experience, nothing except the forms' as the moulds into which the empirical elements that come primarily by way of sense are made to run; and unless this matter' of experience is supplied, there is no knowledge of any kind possible. But when the 'matter' is provided, and the 'forms' are applied to their true and appropriate matter'-there are, as will be seen, cases wherein this does, and others wherein it does not take place-the mind is then not bound down to its particular experiences, but can really conceive and utter universal and necessary (synthetic) truths that no mere experience could ever give.

The detailed exposition of Kant's theory falls under three heads.

I.-Transcendental Esthetic. The impressions of sense are (passively) received as empirical matter' into certain pure or à priori 'forms,' distinguished by the special name of Forms of Intuition.'

1. The data of the internal sense (joy, pain, &c.) fall into, or are received as, a series or succession, in Time: the data of the external senses are received, directly, as lying outside of us and by the side of each other, in Space; indirectly, in their influence upon our internal state, as a succession in Time.

2. As forms, Space and Time are of non-empirical origin; they cannot be thought away, as everything can that has been acquired. They are forms of intuition, in having nothing of the character of abstracted concepts.

3. If they were not à priori, there would be no foundation possible for the established (synthetic à priori) truths of Mathematics and Geometry resting upon the intuition of Space, nor for Arithmetic, which, consisting of the repetition or succession of units, rests upon the intuition of Time.

4. How are we enabled actually to construct the pure science of Mathematics, made up of synthetic truths à priori, is thus to be explained. Because the subjective forms of space or Time are mixed up with all our sense-perceptions (intuitions), and only such phenomena in Space and Time (not Things-in-themselves

or noumena) are ever open to our intuitive apprehension, we may pronounce freely à priori in all that relates to determinations of Space and Time, provided it is understood of phenomena, constituted by the very addition of these mental forms.

II. Transcendental Logic—Analytic. Phenomena (constituted out of the matter' of sense as ordered in the Forms of Intuition) themselves in turn become matter,' which the mind, as spontaneously active, combines and orders in the process of Judgment, under certain forms,' distinguished by the special name of Categories of the Understanding."

1. These are twelve in number, and discoverable from the common analysis of judgments in logic.

a. Three categories of QUANTITY: Unity, Plurality, Universality (as involved in Singular, Particular, Universal judgments respectively).

b. Three of QUALITY: Reality, Negation, Limitation (in Positive, Negative, Infinite judgments).

c. Three of RELATION: Substantiality, Causality, Community or Reciprocal action (in Categorical, Hypothetical, Disjunctive judgments).

d. Three of MODALITY: Possibility, Existence, Necessity (in Problematic, Assertory, Apodeictic judgments).

2. Until a synthesis of intuitions (perceptions) takes place under some one of these pure or à priori concepts, there is no Knowledge, or, in the proper meaning of the word, Experience. The fact of such a synthesis makes all the difference between the mere perception of a particular sequence in the subjective consciousness, e.g. my having the sense of weight in supporting a body, and the objective experience, true for all, The body is heavy.

3. The reason, now, why we can farther say that no possible experience will not come under the Categories, as in saying that effects must have a cause-or, which is the same thing, why we are enabled to utter synthetic judgments à priori, objectively valid, regarding nature-is this, that without the Categories (forms of the spontaneous activity of the pure ego) there cannot be any experience at all; experience, actual or possible, is phenomena bound together in the Categories.

4. But, if we can extend our knowledge beyond actual experience because experience is constituted by the Categories of the Understanding, the extension is only to be to possible objects of experience, which are phenomena in Time and Space; never to Things-in-themselves or Noumena, of which there can be no sensible (intuitive) apprehension.

[Kant makes this apparent chiefly by the consideration, under the head of Schematism of the pure concepts of the Understanding,' of the conditions under which sensible phenomena can be subsumed under the Categories. But we must here forego the exposition of this, and of the system of Principles of the pure understanding' or (synthetic à priori) Rules for the objective use of the Categories, that follows. These, including (1) Axioms

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of Intuition,' (2) 'Anticipations of Perception,' (3) Analogies of Experience'-Amid all changes of phenomena, Substance abides the same, All change obeys the law of Cause and Effect, Substances co-existing in space act and re-act upon each other; (4) Postulates of Empirical Thought'—are the d priori construction that the mind is able to make of a Pure Science, or Metaphysic, of Nature.

III.-Transcendental Logic-Dialectic. Besides the Categories of the Understanding, there are certain other forms of the thinking faculty, according to which the mind seeks to bring its knowledge to higher unities: these are distinguished by the special name of 'Ideas of the Reason' [Reason to be taken here in a narrow sense as opposed to Sense and Understanding].

1. The Ideas of the Reason are three in number: (a) The (psychological) idea of the Soul, as a thinking substance, immaterial, simple and indestructible; (b) The (cosmological) idea of the World, as a system or connected whole of phenomena; (c) The (theological) idea of God, as supreme condition of the possibility of all things, the being of beings.

2. These Ideas of the Reason applied to our Cognitions have a true regulative function, being a constant spur towards bringing our relative intellectual experience to the higher unity of the absolute or unconditioned: but they are not constitutive principles, giving any real advance of knowledge, for truly objective knowledge is only of phenomena as possible objects of experience.

3. Nevertheless, by a law of our mental nature, we cannot avoid ascribing an illusory objective reality to these Ideas, making thus a transcendent' application of the Categories to objects there can never be any possible experience of ('transcendent of experience' versus 'immanent to experience') and by this 'natural dialectic of the Reason,' we become involved in a maze of deception or 'transcendental show,' as seen in the Paralogisms regarding the metaphysical nature of the soul, the Antinomies or contradictory and mutually destructive assertions regarding the universe, and the sophistical arguments for the existence of God— that make up Metaphysics.

(The acknowledged powerlessness of the Speculative Reason to find conditions for the validity of the synthetic judgments à priori of Metaphysics-to prove theoretically the existence of the soul, God, &c., Kant overcame by setting forth Immortality, Free-will, and God, as postulates of the Practical Reason or Moral Faculty; and the Ideas of the Reason then became of use in helping the mind to conceive assumptions that were morally necessary.)

Besides rousing Kant in Germany to undertake his critical inquiries, the general philosophical scepticism of Hume, evoked in Scotland a protest of a different kind, in the believing Commonsense doctrine of Reid. But of Reid's views there was a singular anticipation made by the Jesuit Père Buffier in 1724, in an attempt to refute another and earlier sceptical doctrine, developed out of the fundamental principle of Cartesianism.

FATHER BUFFIER. Buffier anticipated Reid, both in the doctrine of Common Sense, and in the easy way of bringing truths to it. He describes Common Sense as 'that disposition or quality which Nature has placed in all men, or evidently in the far greater number of them, in order to enable them all, when they have arrived at the age and use of reason, to form a common and uniform judgment with respect to objects different from the internal sentiment of their own perception, and which judgment is not the consequence of any anterior principle.' With respect to at least some first principles, men in general are as good philosophers as Descartes or Locke, for all that they have to decide is a matter of fact, namely, whether they cannot help making a particular judgment. But Buffier does not exclude Philosophy altogether; on the contrary, he gives some marks or tests whereby the dictates of common sense may be scientifically ascertained. (1) First principles are so clear that, if we attempt to defend or attack them, it cannot be done but by propositions which manifestly are neither more clear nor more certain. (2) They are so universally received amongst men, in all times and countries, and by all degrees of capacity, that those who attack them are, comparatively to the rest of mankind, manifestly less than one to a hundred, or even a thousand.' (3) However they may be discredited by speculation, all men, even such as disavow them, must act in their conduct as if they were true.

The truths that Buffier considers to belong to common sense are scattered through his book on First Truths.' The basis of all knowledge is 'the interior sense we each of us have of our own existence, and what we feel within ourselves.' Every attempt to prove this truth only makes it darker. In like manner, the idea of unity (personality) is a first truth. Our identity follows from our unity or indivisibility. In opposition to Malebranche, who asserts that mind cannot act upon body, Buffer maintains as a first truth, that my soul produces motions in my body.

Among first truths are included the following:-(1) 'There are other beings and other men in the world besides me. (2) There is in them something that is called truth, wisdom, prudence; and this something is not merely arbitrary. (3) There is in me something that I call intelligence or mind, and something which is not that intelligence or mind, and which is named body; so that each possesses properties different from the other. (4) What is generally said and thought by men in all ages and countries, is true. (5) All men have not combined to deceive and impose upon me. All that I see, in which is found order, and a permanent, uniform, and constant order, must have an intelligence for its cause.'

What may hold the place of first truths in the testimony of the senses? Buffier's answer shows great laxity in the selection of first truths. (1) They (the senses) always give a faithful report of things as they appear to them. (2) What appears to them is almost always conformable to the truth in matters proper for men in general to know, unless some rational cause of doubt presents