Note 21 — PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS.

Page 124, Note 21.—Schiller was a disciple and follower of Kant, who finds the conditions of knowledge in the thinking subject, not in the object that is thought. Since a thinking being does not acquire an insight into the laws of form by experience, but establishes them a priori, Kant believes that things have to conform to cognition and not cognition to things. Man thus produces truth out of his own being, and imports it into the objective world. Now it is true that truth and the criterion of truth, namely reason, develop together with mind; for indeed reason is the characteristic feature of mind. Things are real, not true, and truth can dwell in mental representations only. But considering the fact that mind develops from and by experience which originates by a contact with objects, and that reason is but the formal element extracted from experience and systematized—a consideration which Kant did not make because he never proposed the problem of the origin of mind—we shall find that the nature of reason and truth are not purely subjective. Reason is not an arbitrary classification of things (as the nominalists believe), but a formula that describes the necessary and universal relations of the objective world.—For a critical exposition of the problem see the translator’s books on Kant: The Surd of Metaphysics and Kant’s Prolegomena in which the question “Are there things in themselves?” is answered in the negative, but the existence of forms in themselves is insisted upon. See also the chapters on the “A Priori and the Formal” in his Primer of Philosophy; “The Origin of the A Priori” in his Fundamental Problems; and “The Origin of Mind” in The Soul of Man.