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It is very unfortunate that the philosopher who, as would be generally agreed, has had the greatest influence on modern thought is a writer whose style presents a particularly formidable barrier to the layman, or indeed to any reader tackling him for the first time; and this makes it all the more necessary that an effort should be made by those who have read and studied his works to communicate what they take to be the essential parts of his message. The present article is an attempt to fulfil a part of this function, i.e. to convey a few of the leading ideas of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, while leaving aside altogether his other writings. I hope Kantian scholars will forgive me if in the attempt to make some of Kant's ideas clear in a very small space to readers who have not specialized in the subject but are interested in philosophy I seem not to do justice to the complexity of his finer distinctions. Also I had better add that this article is simply an attempt to state Kant's doctrine; it is not intended as an expression of my own views, and refrains from criticism.
page 45 note 1 Kant, however, thought of causation in phenomena not as involving mysterious dynamic powers in the objects, but only as equivalent to succession according to certain laws which made prediction possible. His view would therefore escape most of the objections commonly urged against “causality” or “necessity” in the physical world.
page 46 note 1 If we retain the “thing-in-itself,” the doctrine remains an assertion that we cannot know anything about reality except in relation to our conscious experience. The step from this to the assertion that there is no reality out of relation to conscious experience seemed easy, though it makes a profound difference to one's philosophy. The former type of view may be traced in the agnostic and positivist writers of the last century, the latter in post-Kantian idealism, including He gelianism, in the English thinkers influenced by Hegel, e.g. T. H. Green and Bosanquet, and in the followers of Croce and Gentile.
page 47 note 1 Kant repudiates indignantly the form of idealism which he thinks Berkeley to have maintained, and while still calling himself an idealist in one sense of the term, actually gives various “refutations of idealism.” But none of these involves the admission that we can know anything more than appearances, i.e. objects existing relatively to our experience, though the Second Edition Refutation suggests a valuable form of realism within idealism.
page 49 note 1 The argument does not necessarily presuppose that all judgments can legitimately be reduced to subject-predicate form, and still holds if we attach more importance in logic than Kant did to relations, for in any case relations must be attached to terms and the process of relating involves making a system.
page 54 note 1 Kant holds that universal causality is a constitutive, not a regulative, principle, but in the Critique of Judgment, where he deals with the problem specially, he treats mechanism not as synonymous with causation but as being a special kind of causation. But in the Critique of Pure Reason and his main ethical works he seems to regard all causation among phenomena as mechanistic. These were, however, written earlier.
page 54 note 2 I.e., for the benefit of the creature itself, not necessarily of man or other creatures.