LECTURE IV
KANT
We saw in the last lecture how the self-analysis of the eighteenth century inevitably tended towards the rediscovery of passion, and finally, towards the great revolutionary movement, in life and in literature, with which the century closed. But we also found that the same Lockean tendency was bound to produce a philosophical skepticism whereof Hume was our chief example. Hume stated the essence of Locke’s theory with an almost brutal simplicity of formulation. We know, he said, impressions, which come to us through sense, and ideas, which are the copies of impressions. About some ideas we can reason. These form the subject-matter of our only demonstrative science, mathematics. All our other science concerns matters of fact, that is, recorded impressions of our experience, with such rational observations as we can make upon them. Does the inner life pretend to more than this, to more than a knowledge of impressions and ideas, — then what is this pretense but sophistry and illusion? The inner life, under this merciless analysis, shrivels up, as it were, into a mere series of chance experiences. The sacred faiths of humanity, do they record seen and felt matters of fact? The moral law, is it more than a feeling in the mind of the sympathetic subject? Hume is indeed merciless; but his mercilessness is, after all, the clear insight of a reflective man. Bare experience of the Lockean sort does indeed contain no such supreme rationality as earlier thinkers had found there. What Hume showed
