of one state or event regularly following another, that the earlier could be inferred (schliessen) from the later (for that would signify objective necessity and a concept of a synthesis a priori); you could only say, in the same way as animals, that similar cases might be expected, thus at bottom rejecting the notion of cause as false, as a mere deception of thought."[1]
This would be for Kant the destruction of objective and therefore (as he reasons) universal validity. Put into experience a framework of a priori conditions under which facts may be subsumed (and so inference made possible), and you endow experience with objective validity, securing for it at the same time universal and necessary assent. Substitute for the objective necessity thus grounded the custom-produced subjective necessity of propositions (ex pumice aquam), and you rob reason of its gift of telling us anything about objects a priori, and reduce human knowledge to the level of animal observation and expectation. A subjective expectation founded upon observation of nature's doings in the past is the terrible alternative Kant offers to his own theory of an objective necessity somehow superinduced upon nature by the a priori apparatus of the human mind ! If, for the sake of an imaginary a priori knowledge, you will not rise to a theory of objective relations, in accordance with what the creative mind of man makes them what they are, you must sink to the brutish plane of a receptive intelligence which takes them as they are! And modern thought has wisely surrendered the phantasies of rationalism for the realities of experience, and, on the whole, found it a tolerable and even a fruitful exchange.
There is no a priori knowledge. To make such an assertion is not, as Kant maintains, "to prove by reason that there is no reason." Reason is the faculty of a priori knowledge, according to Kant; and when I deny there is such knowledge I do not base my denial on this mythical faculty, but on a survey of the whole domain of knowledge. The burden of proof is really on Kant. For it is surely the height of presumption for any finite intelligence to maintain that any law
- ↑ V, 12.
