256 Kant: A Biographyis there truth'."^36 His position amounts to a reversal of this idealism: we
can speak of truth only in knowledge through the senses and experience.
The ideas of pure reason are mere fictions. (Whether Berkeley would have
accepted this characterization of his thought is, of course, a different
story.)
On the other hand, Kant openly confessed that Hume had interrupted
his dogmatic slumber and that in the Critique he was pursuing "a well-
founded, but undeveloped, thought" of Hume. Indeed, he referred to his
first Critique as "the working out of Hume's problem in its greatest pos¬
sible extension."^37 No wonder he was known among his friends as the "Ger¬
man Hume." If Kant's account of "Hume's problem" is considered against
this background, a number of things become immediately obvious. First,
the references to Reid and his followers are no accident. Kant tries to down¬
play their importance, and by attacking them, he is also attacking Feder and
the philosophers close to him. Second, Kant tries to explain his relation to
Hume. Thus he tells us thatHume started in the main from a single but important concept in metaphysics, namely
that of the connection of cause and effect.... He challenged Reason, who pretends to
have conceived this concept in her womb, to give an account of herself and say with what
right she thinks that anything can be of such a nature, that if it is posited, something
else must thereby also be posited necessarily; for that is what the concept of cause says.
He proved irrefutably: that it is wholly impossible for reason to think such a conjunc¬
tion a priori and out of concepts. For this conjunction contains necessity; but it is quite
impossible to see how, because something is, something else must also necessarily be,
and how therefore the concept of such an a priori connection can be introduced. From
this he inferred that Reason completely deceives herself with this concept, in falsely
taking it for her own child.
The question was not whether the concept of cause is correct, useful, and in respect
of all knowledge of nature indispensable, for this Hume had never held in doubt; but
whether it is thought a priori by reason, and in this way has an inner truth independent
of all experience, and hence also has a more widely extended usefulness, not limited
merely to objects of experience; this was the question on which Hume expected En¬
lightenment. He was only talking about the origin of this concept, not about its indis-
pensability in use; once the former were determined, the conditions of its use and the
extent of its validity would have been settled automatically.^38
Kant is also aware of Hume's skepticism, but he believes this skepticism
is a consequence of Hume's inability to understand how the concept of
causality can be thought purely a priori. Indeed, he tells us, Hume's skep¬
tical conclusion was "hasty" and "incorrect." If only for this reason, Kant
never thought of "listening to him [Hume] in respect of his conclusions."