Contemporary philosophy suffers from a morbid belief in Kant. To help towards our emancipation from this belief is the aim of the present essay. It would indeed be criminal to try and minimise the debt which the development of German philosophy owes to Kant’s immortal work. But it is high time to acknowledge that the only way of laying the foundations for a truly satisfying view of the world and of human life is to put ourselves in decisive opposition to the spirit of Kant. What is it that Kant has achieved? He has shown that the transcendent ground of the world which lies beyond the data of our senses and the categories of our reason, and which his predecessors sought to determine by means of empty concepts, is inaccessible to our knowledge. From this he concluded that all our scientific thinking must keep within the limits of possible experience, and is incapable of attaining to knowledge of the transcendent and ultimate ground of the world, i.e., of the “thing-in-itself.” But [375]what if this “thing-in-itself,” this whole transcendent ground of the world, should be nothing but a fiction? It is easy to see that this is precisely what it is. An instinct inseparable from human nature impels us to search for the innermost essence of things, for their ultimate principles. It is the basis of all scientific enquiry. But, there is not the least reason to look for this ultimate ground outside the world of our senses and of our spirit, unless a thorough and comprehensive examination of this world should reveal within it elements which point unmistakably to an external cause.

The present essay attempts to prove that all the principles which we need in order to explain our world and make it intelligible, are within reach of our thought. Thus, the assumption of explanatory principles lying outside our world turns out to be the prejudice of an extinct philosophy which lived on vain dogmatic fancies. This ought to have been Kant’s conclusion, too, if he had really enquired into the powers of human thought. Instead, he demonstrated in the most complicated way that the constitution of our cognitive faculties does not permit us to reach the ultimate principles which lie beyond our experience. But we have no reason whatever for positing these principles in any such Beyond. Thus Kant has indeed refuted “dogmatic” philosophy, but he has put nothing in its place. Hence, all German philosophy which succeeded Kant has [376]evolved everywhere in opposition to him. Fichte, Schelling, Hegel simply ignored the limits fixed by Kant for our knowledge and sought the ultimate principles, not beyond, but within, the world accessible to human reason. Even Schopenhauer, though he does declare the conclusions of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to be eternal and irrefutable truths, cannot avoid seeking knowledge of the ultimate grounds of the world along paths widely divergent from those of his master. But the fatal mistake of all these thinkers was that they sought knowledge of ultimate truths, without having laid the foundation for such an enterprise in a preliminary investigation of the nature of knowledge itself. Hence, the proud intellectual edifices erected by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel have no foundation to rest on. The lack of such foundations reacts most unfavourably upon the arguments of these thinkers. Ignorant of the importance of the world of pure ideas and of its relation to the realm of sense-perception, they built error upon error, one-sidedness upon one-sidedness. No wonder that their over-bold systems proved unable to withstand the storms of an age which recked nothing of philosophy. No wonder that many good things in these systems were pitilessly swept away along with the errors.

To remedy the defect which has just been indicated is the purpose of the following investigations. They will not imitate Kant by explaining what our minds can not know: [377]their aim is to show what our minds can know.

The outcome of these investigations is that truth is not, as the current view has it, an ideal reproduction of a some real object, but a free product of the human spirit, which would not exist anywhere at all unless we ourselves produced it. It is not the task of knowledge to reproduce in conceptual form something already existing independently. Its task is to create a wholly new realm which, united with the world of sense-data, ends by yielding us reality in the full sense. In this way, man’s supreme activity, the creative productivit............