Note 56 — Introductory material

(1) Kant's logical position. The doctrine of synthetic and analytic judgments—at any rate if this is taken as the corner-stone of Epistemology—has been so completely rejected by most modern logicians[71], that it would demand little attention here, but for the fact that an enthusiastic French Kantian, M. Renouvier, has recently appealed to it, with perfect confidence, on the very question of Geometry[72]. And it must be owned, with M. Renouvier, that if such judgments existed, in the Kantian sense, non-Euclidean Geometry, which makes no appeal to intuition, could have nothing to say against them. M. Renouvier's contention, therefore, forces us briefly to review the arguments against Kant's doctrine, and briefly to discuss what logical canon is to replace it.