s pen; and the business of carrying the war into
the enemy's camp has gone on but slowly. Like other campaigns, it long
languished for want of a good base of operations. But since physical
science, in the course of the last fifty years, has brought to the front
an inexhaustible supply of heavy artillery of a new pattern, warranted
to drive solid bolts of fact through the thickest skulls, things are
looking better; though hardly more than the first faint flutterings of
the dawn of the happy day, when superstition and false metaphysics shall
be no more and reasonable folks may "live at ease," are as yet
discernible by the _enfants perdus_ of the outposts.

If, in thus conceiving the object and the limitations of philosophy,
Hume shows himself the spiritual child and continuator of the work of
Locke, he appears no less plainly as the parent of Kant and as the
protagonist of that more modern way of thinking, which has been called
"agnosticism," from its profession of an incapacity to discover the
indispensable conditions of either positive or negative knowledge, in
many propositions, respecting which, not only the vulgar, but
philosophers of the more sanguine sort, revel in the luxury of
unqualified assurance.

The aim of the _Kritik der reinen Vernunft_ is essentially the same as
that of the _Treatise of Human Nature_, by which indeed Kant was led to
develop that "critical philosophy" with which his name and fame are
indissolubly bound up: and, if the details of Kant's criticism differ
from those of Hume, they coincide with them in their main result, which
is the limitation of all knowledge of reality to the world of phenomena
revealed to us by experience.

The philosopher of Koenigsberg epitomises the philosopher of Ninewells
when he thus sums up the uses of philosophy:--

"The greatest and perhaps the sole use of all philosophy of pure
reason is, after all, merely negative, since it serves, not as an
organon for the enlargement [of knowledge], but as a discipline for
its delimitation; and instead of discovering truth, has only the
modest merit of preventing error."[17]

FOOTNOTES:

[14] In a letter to Hutcheson (September 17th, 1739) Hume
remarks:--"There are different ways of examining the mind as well as the
body. One may consider it either as an anatomist or as a painter: either
to discover its most secret springs and principles, or to describe the
grace and beauty of its actions;" and