he calls "fantastic," is perhaps no more so than orthodox metaphysics. He is not, however, wholly
contemptuous of Swedenborg. His mystical side, which existed though it did not much appear in
his writings, admired Swedenborg, whom he calls "very sublime."
Like everybody else at that time, he wrote a treatise on the sublime and the beautiful. Night is
sublime, day is beautiful; the sea is sublime, the land is beautiful; man is sublime, woman is
beautiful; and so on.
The Encyclopedia Britannica remarks that "as he never married, he kept the habits of his studious
youth to old age." I wonder whether the author of this article was a bachelor or a married man.
Kant most important book is The Critique of Pure Reason. ( 1st edition 1781; 2nd edition 1787.)
The purpose of this work is to prove that, although none of our knowledge can transcend
experience, it is nevertheless in part a priori and not inferred inductively from experience. The
part of our knowledge which is a priori embraces, according to him, not only logic, but much that
cannot be included in logic or deduced from it. He separates two distinctions which, in Leibniz,
are confounded. On the one hand there is the distinction between "analytic" and "synthetic"
propositions; on the other hand, the distinction between "a priori" and "empirical" propositions.
Something must be said about each of these distinctions.
An "analytic" proposition is one in which the predicate is part of the subject; for instance, "a tall
man is a man," or "an equilateral triangle is a triangle." Such propositions follow from the law of
contradiction; to maintain that a tall man is not a man would be selfcontradictory. A "synthetic"
proposition is one that is not analytic. All the propositions that we know only through experience
are synthetic. We cannot, by a mere analysis of concepts, discover such truths as "Tuesday was a
wet day" or "Napoleon was a great general." But Kant, unlike Leibniz and all other previous
philosophers, will not admit the converse, that all synthetic propositions are only known through
experience. This brings us to the second of the above distinctions.
An "empirical" proposition is one which we cannot know except by the help of sense-perception,
either our own or that of some one else whose testimony we accept. The facts of history and
geography are of this sort; so are the laws of science, whenever our knowledge of their truth
depends on observational data. An "a priori" proposi-