I should have written before this to thank you for your paper on Paulsen’s view of Kant & 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 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”:

and Kant, especially in his Kritik 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 with kindest regards Yours respectfully