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A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant (1877)
A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant - 1877 Author:Edward Caird Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE CRITICAL SPIRIT IX ANCIENT AND MKOKEVAL PHILOSOPHY. HTHE philosophy of Greece does not correspond to Greek Kant's idea of criti... more »cism, mainly because it does not inJiSU not give to the individual, as such, that independent position, that right of private judgment which has been claimed for him in modern times. The conception that the individual is a law to himself, and that no doctrine can claim to be admitted, no rule to be obeyed by him, except on the evidence of his own consciousness, would have seemed to the Greek philosophers to involve intellectual and moral anarchy. If their speculation was itself an assertion of man's spiritual freedom, yet with them it was an unconscious assertion of it. If they appealed from the senses and the imagination to the reason, yet they did not regard man as essentially rational; and hence their claim for the rights of reason was not a claim for the rights of man. A philosophy that conceives of reason as the special faculty of the Greek as distinguished from the barbarian, of the philosopher as distinguished from the crowd, and not as that consciousness of self which makes us men, can only emancipate the man of culture. Its ideal life is not possible for all ; it is attainable in its perfection only by the philosopher, it is not altogether beyond the reach of the statesman, but it gradually disappears as we descend to the popu- .,''./ lace, who are the mere instruments of a happiness they cannot partake. In such a philosophy the "; ' ;.. claim of the individual to find in his own consciousness the touchstone of truth is not recognised, (and therefore the difficulty that arises when that claim is recognised, cannot be felt. It is not till reason has been distinctly defined as self-conscious and individual, that ...« less