pedagogic use of language, instead of leaving such expressions staring at us from page after page of his works in a perfectly unqualified way. They appear not only in works written while he is supposed to have been working his way towards his own deeper view, but are to be found quite as unambiguously in writings composed long after his whole scheme lay clearly outlined before his mind. A few statements[1] may certainly be pointed to, mostly obscure in their drift and phraseology, which, if they stood by themselves, might be interpreted in an idealistic sense. But when they have to be placed against the mass of counter-evidence – the numberless explicit assertions of the realistic position and the vehement disclaimers of Idealism – which may be quoted from Kant's writings, it is manifest that the Idealism that seems to the eyes of later-born critics to shimmer in the words was not present to Kant in writing them, and that, whatever their meaning may be, an interpretation must be sought not inconsistent with the fundamental Realism of the authentic Kantian philosophy, whether that is formulated in the First Edition or the Second, in the Prolegomena or in Kant's express statements in later years. Of these last I will only refer to his rejoinder to Eberhardt in 1790, the year of the Critique of Judgment, and his public declarations in regard to Fichte and his system in the year 1799. Publicly invited by Fichte to disclaim the derivation of sensation from the impression of things-in-themselves, the aged philosopher hastened to disown the Fichtean idealism which he characterized in the newspapers as a pure logic from which it was a vain hope ever to extract a real object. The Wissenschaftslehre, he had said in a letter to a friend the year before, impressed him "like a kind of ghost." "The mere self-consciousness, or, to be more correct, the mere form of thought without matter – consequently without the reflection having anything before it to
- ↑ The chief passages that seem opposed to a realistic interpretation occur in the chapter on Phenomena and Noumena in the first Critique; but Kant is there speaking in another reference. He is speaking not of the existence of things-in-themselves, but of a non-sensuous intuition of them. Besides, his subsequent declarations are sufficient to show that they are not intended to throw doubt on the existence and causal activity of things-in-themselves.
