KANT'S ANTITHESIS OF DOGMATISM AND CRITICISM. 193 so much from Kant's positive contentions as from his ne- gations and his unfair reflexions upon his precursors, that this paper will offer reasons for dissenting. Yet it is true, I think, that our present somewhat minute inquiry will make it evident that the tendency of Kant's influence has been to obscure or disguise the proper and the historic method of metaphysical reasoning, and to lead to the assumption of a breach of continuity in the secular working out of philo- sophical problems, where none really exists. What Kant means by his antithesis is, of course, sufficiently clear. The distinction between dogmatism and criticism is represented as radical ; and it has a perfectly definite technical character. A dogmatist, in the special sense, is a philosopher who deliberately goes about making synthetic judgments a priori, without first pausing to ask himself whether, or how, such judgments are logically possible. That is the definition of the creature ; and of the motive which leads him to be such as he is, Kant gives a plain account in various passages of the Transcendental Dialectic and of the Prolegomena. The weakness in human nature which causes men to construct dogmatic systems of philosophy is the passion for complete- ness in the conception of things and in the explanation of their conditions, the disposition "to find for every condi- tioned an unconditioned and so to complete the unity of knowledge ". The speculative metaphysician, in short, is the man who suffers from an uncontrolled craving for the abso- lute and ultimate. The reader of Kant cannot fail to derive the impression that the philosophical ambitions of earlier thinkers, and especially of the school in which Kant himself had been brought up, had been characterised by a general ignoring of limits, by a naive assumption of the adequacy of the powers of human reason, and by a careless neglect to define the criteria of truth with either proper narrowness or proper explicitness. Kant's whole picture of the motives and the achievement of all constructive pre-Kantian meta- physicians is the picture of the motives and the achievement of an Icarus. Now this picture is entirely in keeping with the view about metaphysics commonly held by the man in the street, and even by many natural scientists and some philosophers ; but to any one who will take the trouble to understand the inner springs of the historical movement of metaphysical reflexion, it must seem an unintelligent caricature. The primary and exigent philosophic passion, as the history of philosophy displays it, is not the passion for completeness in the con- ception of the world of experience and of the conditions of
