KANT'S ANTITHESIS OF DOGMATISM AND CBITICISM. 203 to judge Kant intelligently, or to know where he stands his- torically, who has not determined the precise attitude which Kant took towards this Wolffian theory of knowledge. There are three possible positions which Kant might have assumed, in order to maintain, in some fashion, his charge of ' dog- matism ' against his forerunners ; and it is essential to de- termine which of the three he adopted or whether he wavered between two or more of them. He might, in the first place, have held that the principle of contradiction, even in its narrowest Leibnitian sense, is not applicable to reality as such, but only to the phenomena of experience ; in this case the contrast between the ' dogmatic ' systems and the Kantian criticism would undeniably be radical. Kant might, again, have held that the principle is valid a priori for all Being, noumenal as well as phenomenal, but only in so far as it is purely analytical ; that judgments based, not upon formal tautologj 7 or formal contradiction, but upon relations of coinherence or incompatibility between distinct and posi- tive ideas are (as Wolff's language had suggested) synthetical ; and that as synthetical, such judgments can have no a priori validity for either phenomena or noumena. In this case, also, he would have presented a fairly definite and significant, though somewhat paradoxical, antagonism to the method of Wolff and his school. Or, finally, Kant might have, held that the principle is, in its fullest sense, valid a priori; that a judgment based upon the discovery of implicit incompati- bilities between the subject and predicate of the contrary proposition, no less than one based upon explicit and verbal inconsistencies between them, is legitimate, and applicable to reality uberhaupt ; but that certain of the special conclu- sions concerning God, the soul, etc., which his predecessors had sought to justify by appealing to the principle, are not really inferrible by means of it. In this last case Kant could not properly have charged his predecessors with a radical error of method ; he could fairly have charged them only with errors of formal logic, in the application of a valid method to certain special problems. And he could not in consistency have maintained that an a priori science of meta- physics is impossible ; for he would virtually have admitted that metaphysical conclusions are possible wherever the prin- ciple of contradiction can be carried wherever incompati- bilities or necessary implications between ultimate concepts can be made out. Such are the issues, in the interpretation and criticism of Kant, which depend upon our answer to the question : Which of these three positions did he actually assume ?
