Note 1185 — Chapter II · SYSTEM OF ALL PRINCIPLES OF PURE UNDERSTANDING

As evidence of this failure I may cite Schopenhauer’s comment upon A 371 and 372: “From these passages it is quite clear that for Kant the perception of outer things in space is antecedent to all application of the causal law, and that this law does not therefore enter into it as its element and condition: mere sensation amounts in Kant’s view to perception” (Werke, i. p. 81). Even when, as in the passages referred to, Kant is speaking in his most subjectivist vein, he gives no justification for any such assertion. Schopenhauer, notwithstanding his sincere admiration for Kant—“I owe what is best in my own system to the impression made upon me by the works of Kant, by the sacred writings of the Hindoos, and by Plato” (World as Will and Idea, Werke, ii. p. 493, Eng. trans. ii. p. 5)—is one of the most unreliable of Kant’s critics. His comments are extremely misleading, and largely for the reason that he was interested in Kant only as he could obtain from him confirmation of his own philosophical tenets. Several of these tenets he certainly derived directly from the Critique; but they are placed by him in so entirely different a setting that their essential meaning is greatly altered. We have already noted (above, p. 41) Schopenhauer’s exaggerated statement of Kant’s intuitive theory of mathematics. Kant’s subjectivism is similarly expounded in a one-sided and quite unrepresentative manner (cf. below, p. 407 n.). Hutchison Stirling’s criticisms of Kant in his Text Book to Kant are vitiated by a similar failure to recognise the completely un-Critical character of the occasional passages in which Kant admits a distinction between “judgments of perception” and “judgments of experience” (cf. above, pp. 288-9). Stirling (cf. below, p. 377) has amplified his criticism of Kant in Princeton Review (Jan. 1879, pp. 178-210), Fortnightly Review (July 1872), and in Mind (ix., 1884, p. 531, and x., 1885, p. 45).