ABSTRACT
It is the right, good, meet, and proper thing to say that Kant was educated to be a rationalist and that he was awakened from such dogmatic slumber by Hume's sceptical attack. It is less conventional, but not less correct, to say that Kant was a man of his time, a time when conventional beliefs were losing ground before a new ideology symbolized but not wholly exhausted in Newton's physics. Kant was a humanist facing not so much an abstract system of possible worlds, but rather a confusing strife of rival theories competing for a place in the cultural sun. Brought up a pietist, educated to be a rationalist, and interested in experimental physics, he became the point of greatest stress in a field of contending forces. One who feels the similar stresses and strains in American life may be pardoned for expressing an exaggerated admiration for the large measure of success that Kant achieved in clarifying the issues in the confusion of the Eighteenth Century, and for looking upon the Critique of Pure Reason as a model in spite of its all too obvious faults of obscurity and incompleteness. It has long been the writer's ambition to discover and disentangle from that special situation the intellectual tools that Kant used and to render them useful again in our own search for intelligibility. Radical changes must be introduced if this is to be at all relevant to contemporary thought.
