“Saving Thy gracious presence, he to me A long-legged grasshopper appears to be, That springing flies, and flying springs, And in the grass the same old ditty sings.”(2)
Kant had reasons for assuming the air of also intending nothing more. But the pretended spring, which was permitted because it was known that it leads back to the grass, this time became a flight, and now those who remain below can only look after him, and can never catch him again.
Kant, then, ventured to show by his teaching that all those dogmas which had been so often professedly proved were incapable of proof. Speculative theology, and the rational psychology connected with it, received from him their deathblow. Since then they have vanished from German philosophy, and one must not allow oneself to be misled by the fact that here and there the word is retained after the thing has been given up, or some wretched professor of philosophy has the fear of his master in view, and lets truth take care of itself. Only he who has observed the pernicious influence of these conceptions upon natural science, and upon philosophy in all, even the best writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, can estimate the extent of this service of Kant’s. The change of tone and of metaphysical background which has appeared in German writing upon natural science since Kant is remarkable; before him it was in the same position as it still occupies in England. This merit of Kant’s is connected with the fact that the unreflecting pursuit of the laws of the phenomenon, the elevation of these to the position of eternal truths, and thus the raising of the fleeting appearance to the position of the real being of the world, in short, _realism_ undisturbed in its illusion by any reflection, had reigned throughout all preceding philosophy, ancient, mediæval, and modern. Berkeley, who, like Malebranche before him, recognised its one-sidedness, and indeed falseness, was unable to overthrow it, for his attack was confined to _one_ point. Thus it was reserved for Kant to enable the idealistic point of view to obtain the ascendancy in Europe, at least in philosophy; the point of view which throughout all non-Mohammedan Asia, and indeed essentially, is that of religion. Before Kant, then, we were in time; now time is in us, and so on.