KANT'S ANTITHESIS OF DOGMATISM AND CRITICISM. 207 tinction by one of his contemporary critics ; and in his reply to that criticism we find him at last brought to face the real issue. Eberhard's Philosophisches Magazin, during the brief period of its issue (1789-90), was devoted chiefly to proving that Kant had not rendered Leibniz and Wolff obsolete, and that he even did not depart so widely from their doctrines as he appeared to suppose. It was in the execution of this task that Eberhard pointed out those obvious facts to which the present paper has again called attention. Long before Kant's Kritik, Eberhard insisted, a distinction equivalent to that between analytical and synthetical judgments had been familiar in the Wolffian school. "Analytical judgments are those whose predicates express the essence, or a part of the essence, of the subject (das Wesen, oder einige von den wesent- lichen Stiicke, des Subjekts) ; those of which the predicates express qualities that do not belong to the essence are syn- thetic." Now synthetic judgments are valid a priori when (and only when) " their predicates are 'properties' (attributa) of the subject, that is, determinations which do not belong to the essence of the subject, yet have their sufficient ground in that essence ". When, now, this and much more of a similar sort had been publicly pointed out, it was manifestly incumbent upon Kant to define plainly his position with respect to the central epistemological doctrine of the Wolffians, which he had previously ignored. Plain and unequivocal his answer J is not ; yet in the end it amounts to an abandonment of his case against the ' dog- matists '. Here was Kant's opportunity, if he really wished to set his theory of a priori knowledge in sharp contrast with that of the older school, to say, in so many words : ' I deny that the principle of contradiction is susceptible of the ex- tension which Wolff has given to it ; I do not recognise the existence of any such necessary relations of coinherence be- tween distinct concepts, going beyond the purely formal necessity that a concept shall be identical with itself '. But so far from doing anything of the sort, Kant readily accepts Eberhard's (that is, Wolff's and Baumgarten's) distinction between essentialia and attributa, and acknowledges that the latter are no less necessarily, though they are less directly, connected with their subjects, than are the former. In repeat- 1 Ueber eine nene Entdeckung, nach der alle Kritik der reinen Veniunft entbehrlich werden soil (1790). To any who wish to understand Kant's relation to earlier logic and metaphysics, and so to determine his place in the history of those sciences, this Reply to Eberhard is one of the most important of his writings for reasons that are made apparent in the text. It is, however, full of flounderings and self-contradictions.
