KANT'S ANTITHESIS OF DOGMATISM AND CRITICISM. 205 obviously nothing at all ; for it is not even an idea (Gedanke); " and from the Progress of Metaphysics: " anything of which the idea is unthinkable, i.e., anything of which the concept ^contradicts itself, is an impossibility ". The passage in the Kr. d. r. V. (first ed., p. 150) should be familiar : " Whatever the object of our knowledge may be, and whatever the re- lation between our knowledge and its object, it must always be subject to that universal, though merely negative, con- dition of all our judgments, that they do not contradict themselves. . . . The Principle of Contradiction is a general though negative criterion of all truth. . . . No cognition can run counter to that principle without destroying itself." Kant's general recognition of the a priori validity and im^ "portance of the principle of contradiction as an absolute criterion of the nature of reality is thus unmistakable. Did he, however, accept the principle in one of those modi- i fied and restricted senses which I have indicated as open^j to him? The answer must be that Kant's attempts, in the writings of the critical period, to tell what he takes the principle of contradiction to mean, are characterised, not only by a curious vagueness and confusion of ideas, but also by a per- sistent ignoring of just that distinction between the two Jdnds of judgment a priori which Wolff and Baumgarten had made so essential. One point, indeed, is clear : Kant always speaks of judgments resulting from the principle of contradiction as purely "analytical". This, however, does not settle much more than a question of nomenclature ; .the usage of Wolff's own disciples was not well settled upon this point. The important thing is not so much to deter- mine whether the relation of predicate to subject in judg- ments per attributa can best be called analytical or synthetical there are intelligible reasons for calling it either but whether such judgments are legitimate at all, and what their logical nature is. And here Kant writes as if he had read nothing in German philosophy since Leibniz and only a part of Leibniz. For, in the largest class of passages on the subject, Kant goes on as if nobody had ever suggested the possibility of (finding in judgments per impossibilitatem contrarii anything more than the coccysmus inutilis which even Leibniz had declared that they were not. In " analytical judgments," we are told, the connexion of predicate with subject durch Identitdt gedacht wird ; and hence "our knowledge is in no way extended by them," their only service being " to put the concepts that I already possess into better order, and to
