192 ARTHUR o. LOVEJOY: guilty of three rather singular oversights. In the first place, he had failed to hold clearly in mind what the doctrine of philosophical method held by his immediate predecessors had actually been. In the second place, he had failed to consider duly and define clearly the relation of his own doc- trine to a familiar principle which has been the main and the generally accepted instrument of metaphysical reasoning, as well before his day as after it. And in the third place, he had forgotten and most of his expositors have ever since overlooked the fact that, of the special arguments in which he worked out his own ' critical ' method, the most important and ostensibly the most ' critical ' namely, the argument about causality embodied in the Second Analogy of Experience was merely an elaboration of an argument already employed by Kant's ' dogmatic ' predecessor, Wolff, from whom he seems unconsciously to have borrowed it. 1 These considera- tions will, I hope, throw an appreciable, and, if that be con- ceivable, a somewhat new illumination upon the limitations of Kant's thought and upon its historical connexions. Now that the world, and especially the Germanic part of it, has ceased celebrating not without a certain measure of un- philosophical Schwarmerei the centenary of the worthy Koenigsberger's death, nothing, I take it, could be more fitting than that students of the history of thought should undertake a new inquest into the real originality, and the real value, of this central idea of the thinker who is credited, above all, with giving to philosophy a new and definitive method. The outcome of the inquiry will, I think, tend somewhat to qualify the conventional high estimate of Kant's importance, so far as the methodological question is con- cerned. Prof. William James has, in a public address, laid hands on our father Parmenides with some boldness : " I believe," he says, "that Kant bequeaths to us not one single conception which is both indispensable to philosophy and which philosophy either did not possess before him, or was not destined inevitably to acquire after him, through the growth of men's reflexion upon the hypotheses by which science interprets nature. The true line of philosophic pro- gress lies, in short, not so much through Kant as round him, to the point where we now stand. Philosophy can perfectly well outflank him, and build herself up into an adequate fulness by prolonging more directly the older English lines." This is rather more than I care here to maintain ; it is not 1 This third point cannot be dealt with within the limits of this paper. The proof of it is offered in a forthcoming article by the present writer in the Archiv fur Getchichte der Philosophic.
