Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912 edition. Excerpt: ... would be absurd to assert that the products of logical analysis, the "a priori forms of intuition and thought," such as Space and Time, Cause, Substance, Interaction, etc., were actt1al existences, and not abstractions "implied in reality." And so Kantian epistemology remains in the air, a great mist, as it were, suspended between science and metaphysics, and makes ineffectual attempts to come into contact with both. But this is intrinsically impossible, and all it does is to obscure the issues between science and metaphysics, and by the fog it raises, to prevent the combatants from meeting, and either fighting out, or, as is more probable, composing their differences. Its contributions to the question of the relation of science and metaphysics are always irrelevant and often misleading. For whether it be its misfortune or its fault, epistemology is in the habit of using terms in a peculiar sense of its own. When we are told, e.g., that " the conception of cause is a priori and cannot be derived from experience, because it is the presupposition of all experience," or informed that "an eternal self is the presupposition of all knowledge," we are, according to the bent of our sympathies, either consoled or confounded. But the exultation of the one party and the depression of the other are alike premature. Upon further inquiry it appears that the priority of the epistemologists is not in time at all and does not refer to historical events. They are not making scientific statements about the actual origin or metaphysical statements about the ultimate nature of knowledge, but only speaking about the relation of certain factors in existing knowledge. They do not mean that the sense, especially when he ' theologizes, ' and declares that...
