Kant: A Biography

Silent Years 197

losophy. Though much of the book is just a summary of Kant's position,

Herz also offered a number of criticisms. Kant had been content just to

discuss the differences between what is subjective and what is objective,

and to show that sensible cognition is concerned only with something

subjective, while rational cognition aims at "the objective in things" and to

delineate the principles at work in each.^35 Herz declares,

I believe, however, that I can maintain with great persuasiveness that there exists a

much too great difference even between the relations of things as we determine them

in accordance with the laws of pure reason and what is true of these things indepen¬

dently from our cognition. I base this on nothing less than the nature of our cognition

in general. Locke shows that it extends never further than to the qualities which these

things have.... But what makes the substrate, which has all these qualities, can itself

not be a quality again. ... It thus ceases to be an object of our cognition.. ,^36

We cannot know things in themselves in any sense. Whatever the principles

of the intelligible world amount to, they do not amount to knowledge of

things in themselves. Kant must be wrong about the latter point.

In the context of the discussion of Crusius's "principle of accidental-

ity," which amounts to the claim that "whatever exists contingently has at

some time not existed," he pushes this argument further. If he had used

Locke with regard to the concept of substance, he now argues essentially

along Humean lines:

Magister Kant believes that we fall into this error because we erroneously transform
into a condition for the object what is in our subjective knowledge the most certain sign
of the accidental character of the thing (namely our knowledge that it did not exist at
one time). Perhaps it will not be entirely disagreeable, if you follow me farther back. ..
I have already said something about the difference between absolute and hypothetical
necessity earlier. If it has been established that nothing can exist without a reason, then
the latter must apply to everything apart from the absolutely necessary being.... Since
accidental things necessarily presuppose a reason and can therefore exist only as a con¬
sequence, we must, I believe, investigate the concepts of cause and effect further....
So much seems certain: the repeated observations of two successive events are the only
thing that provided us the occasion to expect them in accordance with the rules of
probability as constantly conjoined with each other, and to call that which was prior in
time cause, and that which was later in time effect. The concept of tipie, which has en¬
tered into both concepts, and which thus belongs to them just as it belongs to all ex¬
periential knowledge, is so conjoined with them in our representation that we cannot
think cause and effect without space and time even in pure rational cognitions where
space and time are not present.^37

Herz claims, in other words, that causality is just as infected by sensibility

as any other concept. It cannot be legitimately used in a purely rational