Balliol College

July 12 1900

My dear Sir

I should have written before this to thank you for your paper on Paulsen’s view of Kant[1] & for the kind expressions with which you accompany it. I have so much to do in other directions at present that I am not able to write about | the subject, as you kindly invite me.

As to my opinion of the controversy – I should better compare Kant to Socrates than to Plato. Socrates like Kant professes ignorance, & wishes to confine philosophy to “human things”; but, also like him, he applied a point of view[a] which made possible a great effort of idealistic philosophy (in Plato and Aristotle) to comprehend the world.

It is easy as you show to | adduce many passages in which Kant (like Socrates) speaks of the limitations of knowledge. But

“Methinks the lady doth protest too much”[2]:

and Kant, especially in his Kritik[b] of Judgment, is continually taking new liberties with these limitations, though always with a new assistance of them.

In any case the position of one who holds that mere entia rationis are yet “necessary presuppositions of human reason” is a position of instable equilibrium, | which his followers were certain to abandon, some of them in favour of one of these views & some in favour of the other.

I think then that Kant is one of the greatest of Metaphysicians – subject to the qualification that he constantly denied the possibility of Metaphysics.

… and[c] with kindest regards Yours respectfully[d]

Edward Caird