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Kant perhaps thought he was delivering religion from the empiricists, by a method superior to that of Leibtniz. Thus he revealed through his Press on the activity of the human expedient, some of the error of Locke, whom he accused of sensualising concepts^2* ; and made frequent allusion to the system of Leibniz, whom he accused of intellectualising appearances^3* . . .

Christian­Theism however has no need to flee to the comforting arms of this other Immanuel to be delivered from these extremes of thought, neglectful as they do not fail to be of their reciprocal fields of evidence. If it did, it would find the result of Ahaz who fled from Syria to Assyria: the 'deliverer' for all his protestations, was to emerge yet more alien than the protagonist^4* . Thus Kant, it will appear as we proceed, transcendentalists fact.

In a limited and ancillary study of this type, we should not and do not seek to provide yet another commentary on Kant: perhaps this would be as needless to scholarship as it would be valueless for our own procedure. Our concern with Kant is limited by our objective to amplify in terms of our Thesis on Predestination and Freewill, the claim that Kant's theory is vitally inconsistent^5* . Within these terms of address, our interest is purely and properly negative. It is true that Kant's system is manifestly not within our defined scope of Christian­Theism ­ a point which we shall further evidence shortly; that it is therefore outside the actual domain of our Thesis. It is also true that even in its own terms, the Kantian approach manifests its own retirement in the face of such rigorous consistency­demands as we desire to meet in our presentation of Christian­Theism; and this we have noted^5* .

The system of Kant is thus both logically and conceptually divorced from our labours. Nevertheless, it presents so classic an exposition of certain concepts so near to our field and so contrary to our tenor whilst sometimes insidiously close in appearance, that it seems appropriate to adopt our present course. This is to provide precisely such a brief review of certain salient logical deficiencies in Kant's view; such an account from the point of view of Christian-Theism of the ultimate ground of these defects and their necessary character: as that which follows.

Thus we will submit that these outlined defects not merely invalidate any claims which might have been made for logical success for Kantianism in the general area of which we have chosen a specialist part, but actually follow from his presuppositions of autonomy as viewed from the perspective of Christian­Theism. Moreover such a set of Kantian presuppositions is in turn readily comprehensible in our terms: a point to which we shall revert (pp.190-194 infra.).

INTRODUCTION

This is no place to provide a discursive disquisition on Kant's views as such; and we shall simply recall that he envisages a real world of substance systematically unknown (noumena^6* ) because systematically unknowable: and a phenomenal world of mentally "treated" data available to humans; and this latter is denied the cognomen of reality' just because the mind interposes its activities, imprinting its active categories of procedure and knowledge and understanding upon the "raw material" obtained through the senses. In the moral realm^7* , Kant avers, although we cannot have accurate knowledge of God⁷₍because Supposedly noumenal), yet irrespective of our mental aptitude and acumen individually (because, conversely, this is a systematic matter), we do have a "break­through": an imperative^8* of duty "exists", asserts itself, and although remaining unaccountable per se, and indefeasible, demands a correlate of freedom and adumbrates a nexus of moral laws. This imperative, then, we know in reality; and Kant builds a large account of the moral realm and the kingdom of moral things upon it.

It will already be apparent that Kant's theory seeks a radical re­orientation of experience; he uses his own technical vocabulary, often adopting old words with new significations. Rather than vacate their normal usage, and to avoid confusion, we shall follow the simple device, already exemplified above, of italicising all terms here used in the Kantian sense, except context or earlier italics make this needless. Except where no difficulty is conceivable no other italics will be used in this review.
 
 

1. ETIOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN THE CONCEPTION OF KANT'S KINGDOM
 

The First Inconsistency .. The Moral.

Since we shall not hesitate to assert that Kant's particular approach to matter and morals is misconceived, it is desirable that we should first give some account of a feasible etiology of his conception of morality. In due course (pp.236 ff. infra), we shall see the wider interpretative perspective of Christian­Theism; but initially a more immediate point arises in a particular area of its relationship to Kant.

Before his day, there was current much pseudo­religious moralism; and its rationalistic trend did not fail to provoke resistance because of its pretentious seeming piety. Sometimes truth was admixed with tedious triviality, allowing uncertain and syncretistic results. Self­interest could be speciously invoked. The clear call of unconditional duty (or indeed of anything unconditioned) often muted even in Churches, where these were tepid, could be expected to bring at least a resonance elsewhere: in Kant it did. It is not the least memorable feature of this philosopher that despite the form of his assertion, which we hold to be untenable, he assiduously asserted the reality of that which is unconditioned.

In that period, quite specific arguments were not uncommon, which perhaps with aspirant intention sought to popularise religion; and our point here is not so much their insufficiency as their circulation. Thus it might be said: There is a Supreme Being and there are many men. Len made by the Supreme ought not to act as if the Supreme Being were not the original author and owner of themselves as His property. Therefore each man ought to have due circumspection with regard to both himself and others; for are not all the property of another? As such they ought not to be interfered with, or injured or despoiled; and in so far as this Supreme Being is the author, and things are as they are and made by One who has so composed them, truth and honesty ought to be engaged in. To fail in this is to violate realism ­ indeed the very constitution of one's being and that of others.

In this, more often inadequate than erroneous, we have rather the ethics of Deism than the motives of Christianity. Why not avoid the reduced status of divinity and talk in mere terms of ethical universality, the categorical implications of human units, each of moral stature? Why follow the sort of consideration brought up by Hooker in his Ecclesiastical Polity, when philosophical simplicity beckons and religion seems to be losing the originative thrust of a divine authenticity? Has not the philosopher Wolff, Kant's countryman renowned for his stress on 'natural religion' and did not his enemies claim that he taught the dispensability of the Christian religion for human happiness? However wrong they may have been, such a challenge to a depreciated form of Christianity was neither unnatural nor unusual; Tindal meanwhile pursued his addresses in this vein, across the Channel.

We can then assume that some of these popular considerations had entered into the mind of Kant; they may have been subterranean; but if so, they might the more readily constitute the stuff of presuppositions.

Immediately (since we are human, this is nearer to a logical than a chronological immediacy) there could well be envisaged bursting out of Kant's intensely ratiocinative mind, and not lacking propulsion from a mental repugnance to the increasingly transparent relativism, certain conclusions. From his point of view, these might appear to be arriving unannounced from the ultimate, the sublime (to which they do give, in turn, a verbal recognition). To Kant, disposed not to allow inspiration and revelation⁹, in propriety to depose ingredients involving discursive and realistic intellection, these might appear as a moral categorical imperative coming from dimly discerned reality, even from the categorically inexpressible noumena. Of that, therefore, even of that ­ to one of Kant's metaphysical predilections, this could be taken as a testimony at the moral level' an impartation from that sublime area of conceived but not conceptualised reality.

It is not our intention to defend what we seek in part to account for, and later to account for more deeply. For Kant, this categorical imperative appeared to provide indeed a flair, a scent as it were, not analysable in se, but mysteriously acquiring conceptual status and so involving categories. Has this not then a sort of Kantian miracle, a genteel rebellion against the postulates of empirical thought, by which he had tied these categories to another mode of operation, improper for noumena? For we must acknowledge that ­ however Kant obtained his practical reality, his moral intuition, his imperative ­ reality, he asserted it unequivocally to be: and, without equivocation, with categories he conceived it.

Before we proceed forward to the particular construction here made by the philosopher, we must refine this thought and reflect in terms of our objective in this Essay.

Kant, then, is evidently prepared to allow such categories as causality to operate unconditioningly in an unknown but supersensible reality made manifest in the categorical imperative, in addition to appearing in that theoretical or scientific cognitive spectrum which involves the means of objective comprehension. Causality, he feels, is not a mere interpretative contrivance for perceived sense data, but a dynamic orientative device which as such need not be confined to the theoretical field. Hence he allows in his Critique of Theoretical Reason for its possible and (necessarily non­formative^10* ) operation in an ultra­mundane or moral sense, in the matter of human agency. He notes also that its effects ­ through the inherent potencies of freedom as cause ­ will be visible in and move through the normal area of theoretical reason's conceptions. The consequences of the operation of freedom as cause will move into, through and in the channels of theoretical reason's conceptions in categories. Thus these consequences these products of freedom will merge into the panorama inspected by ­ the understanding.

This consideration reinforces our view which we shall later further define and develop on other grounds, that Kant actually has an interactive nexus of moral and theoretical causation; that, further, all the explicatory and productive potency of causality is indicated in fact to exist apart from the contributory or regulative dynamic activities of men's minds: and hence further attests the propriety of the conclusion that Kant posits causality independently of its mental "creation" and beyond this; that he acts on the implicit assumption that it "exists" and asserts itself without mental origination. (This conclusion also we shall later develop on other grounds). Nor is this the only category operative in the moral and noumenal area of conceptualisation. It is the case that Kant's moral and scientific areas have such categories alike; indeed, as he admits, he could not even think of entities at all without them^11* .

The categories of the understanding are therefore (as "categories of freedom") applied to a new subject matter without any pretence of having been borne with it or born from it; for if they were, this new noumenal subject matter would be highly intelligible, indeed equipped with auto­intelligibility, as we might almost term it.

The mind therefore is indeed active in embracing its various material; but we cannot divide reality into Phenomenal and noumenal plurality. Indeed, as we shall in detail argue, the very process of division necessarily involves minimal but definite conceptual designation of each segment? thus defeating the noumenal proposition at the outset. Such a defect is not found in the Christian­theistic differentiation of Creator­creature, the latter derivative from the Creator in a manner such as that which we have sought to define in the Thesis itself.

Having reflected on our first major consistency criticism of the Kantian system, we now proceed forward to observe the system of particular kind which is to be built.

We find the moral law: Always so act as to treat somebody else as though he IS an end in itself^12* . Facetally that follows from the moral status quo which we sought initially to describe. You do not own that other person. You do not even own yourself. How can you interfere with Another's property! Let his manipulation be divorced from your devices.

Again, take Kant's law: Act so that the maxim of thy will can always at the same time hold good as a principle of universal legislation^*l3* . Push God into a postulate^*l4* , then consider your autonomy. Bereft of direct contact but under original sway, you must now nicely realise that if there were a supreme legislation (of course we are said to be unable to submit noumenal particularities to intellection), but if there were one, it would not be less than applicable both to you and to all the other discrete units which devolve upon the universal and supreme being^15* . Mere particles of existential parity enshrining noumenal realities which outwit the strongest soaring of your own minds, you must discern yourselves as alike implicated in the idea of law (for of these laws we can have no idea except the idea), the consistency of which attests rationality; for if in the folly of finitude, you were to pursue the un-universalisable or undisciplined ­ for does it not come to the same thing? ­ oddities of morally nescient individuation that you are, then manifest collision, confusion and superficial confrontation would defile the dignity which your powers and position attest.

If we postulate a moral nostalgia and an agnostic trend in an admirer of Plato, it is not difficult to account for the moral laws of Kant. It is not easy otherwise; for they assume an indifference to individuality which is not evident either in nature or personality; an unawareness of mission which might suit mathematical constructs of humanity, but which is markedly deficient in meeting men as they manifest themselves to be: while it is substantial in its impact on special pleading, it is purely formal and unsubstantial both with regard to the purpose of humanity and the individual, appearing to ignore Kant's reflections on non­identity^16* which, while directed to things material, are vastly more applicable to men.

If men were expressible in terms of rules, then morality would suffice as legal; to the extent that they are not, equity is an inadequate morality, just as autonomy is inadequate religion, for men inadequately informed concerning their nature.

Kant's moral kingdom is inadequate; but it is also inconsistent^17* with its presuppositions. We should now amplify this preliminary finding made in the course of our moral survey (pp.212­214 supra).

We found, above, the legal and legislative side of things given for man a form of rational self­expression^18* ; whilst the spiritual and personal sides of things were treated as sub­categories of the intellectual categories which they may elect to employ, leading to the reflection that reason without content is scarcely adequate for the very real and diverse content of men; or for any reality for which uniformitarianism is legislated in absence of knowledge;

It is, indeed, hard to think of legislation (if we are going to think) without a legislator. Man as a candidate for this role in the system _­ man, as a being ontologically autocratic^19* , however assiduously so, is not very convincing; for "autonomy" without aseity is always contained in its constituted consignments: its very legislature is legislated, and while something of its legal environs in particular may be discerned, it cannot act as the law­giver, and be "originally legislative" of truth.

Kant is an agile abstractionist, and in the tenor of his arguments has abstracted himself into a formal corner. Through the very exclusive^20* status accorded "the consciousness of this fundamental law" of morals, allegedly making its impact through "the mere form of the law" - through indeed this "sole fact of pure reason"^21* : he has left himself with what is both a superficial abstraction and a part-reality by its form of expression; and this last is precipitated by his theoretical requirements. As such, it is of course filled with difficulties for people who have not bothered to adapt and become abstractions.

It is therefore understandable in one so formalised and limited that he should wish to stress aspects of his moral system; strenuously removed from phenomenal derivation, as possessing the "reality of the supersensible world"^22* . Freedom for example, the correlate of the categorical imperative is, according to Kant, decisively non­empirical in status: yet it is "even as regards the law of its causality definitely and assertorially known". To be emphatic, Kant notes negatively that it is not "merely indefinitely and problematically thought": no! it has "long been in the reason of all men, and incorporated in their nature."

Reality itself, then, has made moral incursions: moral reality has propounded its 'beyond' noumenality so that our allegedly illuminating intellection can move and manipulate in this section of actuality itself. We find more even than intrusive form, which is in any case knowable and attributable as actual and appropriate to a subject matter which is to that extent known; we find the feet of that decisive quality of freedom, its kind and attributes not mystically but methodologically represented and theoretically embraced in an interactive system.

Nevertheless we assert that this, if inconsistent, is understandable. These almost quaint subreptions if not irruptions, attest the power and impact of evidence which Kant has begun to survey, found impelling, and yet wished to remove from the condition of affinity and relevance for thought. His alternative, after all (under the circumstances) was not to have written his Critique of Practical Reason or to have omitted its whole distinctive status. Perhaps some might think that for that, it was worth an inconsistency. But on account of the inconsistency, the system does not merit adoption.

It may be well for us however to pass in review the integral character which is emerging for system, within the limits characteristic of any system as such.

Thus we have an array of correlation. Nominally "purely formal" and mere rationally shaped but empty shells of principles, laws, and the maxims devolving upon them; the causative connotation of freedom with its capacity to articulate and reticulate with empirical particularities as a perquisite of its office and an outcome of its exercise; the mandatory and relational distinctions within it; the objective reality of law and the assertorial necessity of freedom; the community of operation of concepts; the strict supervision by logical laws of the same basic character of the occurrences listed within and outside what we might call the "bamboo­curtain"; the positive and negative aspects of moral facts; the mutual involvement from the different standpoints of the 'possible' and the 'assertorial', the 'supposition' and the 'knowledge' (ibid., p.l39): these things manifest a formal, functional and logical communality attesting desegregation.

They also attest that the very 'hidden' character of the 'noumenal' is in such ways violated by the prying eyes of theoretical, manipulative, analysing and hypothesising reason. This has ordered, systematised, applied, estimated the force and impact as well as differentiated the specificities of the 'unknown'. We conclude then that this part at least of the noumena is knowable just because it is known; and because it is said to be truly known, it is truly systematically co­ordinated with and correlative to the normal noetic imprint of the categories to which thought is in man assigned. It is indeed not beyond thought but rather within it that we shall find ourselves able to differentiate, in our reviews.

The case is then, that the whole logic is systematically operative within and between the total nexus of phenomena and noumena. It is not in this way that there is to be obtained the radical differentiation and vaster comprehensiveness that Kant would seek.

It is in vain to claim that there is more to be found not touched, in noumena. Just so long as noumena and phenomena are embraced in one intelligible series of concepts, it becomes impossible to denote their formal aspects as non­alignable, the formal aspect of one unassertable as valid in the realm of the other. We have here one brand of form, one bond of union, one mental motif; and it also ­ though not surprisingly when one considers the multiple regions of a creation necessarily somewhat correlated ­ persists and exists beyond the mind (cf. pp.172 ff., endnotes 6­8).

To accord proper credit to Kant in this matter, he has stressed that the mind is active and not merely passive, and he has explored something of its vigorous capacities; but to append the debit he misleads in assuming its activity as formally creative, instead of creatively formal, and formally suited to create realistically.
 

2. INFORMAL IRRUPTIONS
 

The Second Inconsistency .. The Experimental.

In addition to the auto­derivative impact of Kant's own contentions, affliction comes from another and outside source. In Kantian terminology, the noumena invade. Let us pursue this first as a possibility through an expressly simple example, that the case might be more pointed. In this, we do not concern ourselves with the 'novelties of Nature'; we regard rather the almost urbanely repetitive continuities: urbane, however, at most in appearance.

The illustrative (in literature perhaps not improperly. illustrious) case which we have in mind, is that of grass - when it grows. As it does this, it exhibits obviously force­moulding properties and continuity of design. You may call this last term: 'sequence of serially co­ordinated patterns correlated perspicuously with the format and function of the ultimately produced object, while as yet none of the organs of its maturity are present, and implemented continuously'^23* etc., if this seems desirable. But should we quarrel over a word and turn ourselves into designers of a dictionary instead of a program of thoughts? Certainly we have said and exhibited what we mean.

Now these things are not attributable to anything observable or even imaginable in the seed; we can analyse­and-sub­analyse to our heart's content (or, to be more historical, discontent).

This, we may say, is a derivative of that; that is composed of such units: those incorporate further knowable entities. Such deft interest is displayed! Yet did we not know that this was the type of material consideration before the investigation was made. Where is the "theoretical" schema to which the seed must conform as mature grass when as yet not even the organic parts to be correlated, or the lairs of their unitary operation are present? Proliferate the sub­stratal minutiae ad infinitum, and you are yet left with the same basic problem ­ How can matter with its observance of ontologically apt correlative laws contain in certain initial aggregations: the form sequence, continuity, laws of total, partial and minute operation, vital potential, capacity to actualise such potential, the plan and impetus ... of grass?

That certain key collocations of matter are in fact conducive to certain episodic and periodic consequences of this type precisely is to the materialist, the mystery of such life. It makes it more poignant the more he pursues it. But it does not solve it.

On the contrary, the simpler are his most discrete sub­strata, the more baffling are the co­ordinated conclusions. The further you go, the more perfect is the problem, and the more obvious is the fact that the power of origination, in whatever orderly sequence through key indicator units^24* it may elect to legislate, is as invisible as the mind of the thinker who sees it; and that despite philosopher Kant's tag of 'noumenal', it is doing very well in invading, irrupting and evidencing itself outside the allegedly containing, conditioning capacities of the mind, which ought to have rendered it, through the particular character of the mental constitution of all knowledge, in effect invisible to thought.

With all due respect to Kantianism, but more especially to the ineluctable evidence, we cannot be satisfied that formal chain­type cohesion or internal formal adequacy is other than maximally featured by this theory, at this level under present review, by its manifest absence. The theory has simply failed to account for an order of evidence which is neither recherché nor remote, but vast and vital: and is that not phenomenal? If a theory denies the possibility of the actual, we must deny the actuality (in terns of tenability) of the theory.

The same considerations apply as to type, to the series of upgrading complexities (i.e. upgrading in that respect) which preceded our world as we know it and led procedurally to it. In terms of palpable causation we are at a loss; for irrespective of the methodology the result is not assignable to perceptible causation. You cannot have a resultantly unidirectional procedure in a given and increasingly heightened regard by chance: choose, imagine and criticise in detail what method you will; for the unsystematic irregularity of chance is not compatible with the systematic regularity of the observable matrix of continuity, exhaustively though not exclusively legal, notably but not accountably tendential.

If we take what we find as evidence, rather than what we do not find but postulate that we should find (moving that is, from Aristotle to Galileo), we are left with a theoretic al need to account: we move again to the invisible vectors and volitions requisite to account for the phenomena. And so on. It is an old story. These 'noumena' evidence themselves where they are theoretically excluded^25* , in the very interstices of our thinking, in the plethora of phenomena, within the considerations of ingressive causality.

If Kant theoretically invaded the "noumena", they are no less willing and constantly far more able to invade his phenomena^26* . East and West have met from each side of the earth; or, put differently, we have invasion and irruption alternatively. A unity for which Kant yearned^27* is consistently manifested, though its conception demands other terms than his.

On these other terms, the institution of the world itself, as we shall see (cf. pp. 235 ff. infra) and the constitution of the properties of character and persistence are far from providing an affront to discursive reason; on the contrary, these are ratiocinatively attested by it.
 

3. THE UNITY OF CAUSALITY ­ CONCEIVED AND CREATED (DIRECTLY)
 

The Third Inconsistency .. The Ultra­Systematic, with reference to

The Fourth Inconsistency .. the Rational (p.223, with endnote 29).

Thus Kant's system may be seen inconsistent with examined facts, internal or external; and to evidence inadequacies. Numerous considerations, and several types of consideration have operated to constrain us to reject Kant's whole formally distinctive noumenal phenomenal^28* structure, hence his mental type of formally creative activity, and thus his epistemology. The persistence of this result is now such that we may do well to consider if there is not some apparent incoherence or instability affecting the very structure of his special theory. In causality, we provide an instance. This is emphasised through its repeated appearance, above.

Accordingly, we must ask: What is it which is said to cause cause (or more sophisticatedly but less pointedly, cause causality) in Kant's formally mentally created experiential universe^29* ? Is not the understanding, allegedly the cause of cause? Is it not a concept of the labouring, marshalling, formalising understanding? ²⁹ In so far as Kant seeks to account for this cause as we know it, allegedly 'mentally orientated', he is forced to deploy some source or logical origin; and wherever he locates this, the certainty is there that the embracive cause must already be.

All such endeavours must meet this impasse quite systematically. In particular, Kant asserts that the understanding implants cause in the data, so that our conceptualisations as ordered experience, have this aspect added. If, however, the understanding has caused cause, being the source of this experienced consideration, then it has constituted causality, ipso facto: yet it is by means of this same causality that it has constituted causality; so that the causality must have existed, a causative influence in causing causality; so that, in turn, the understanding could not have caused that entire category of existence, for this would then have needed to pre­exist its causation of causality so that such an action would be possible. In a word, it could not have caused 'cause' because it would in so doing have attested 'cause'; it would have evidenced a precedent causality. {To create its baby, it would have had to use it first. And that? It is not creation. The thing is there to be used to assist in its birth. Hence the understanding cannot be the cause of causality. It uses it to create it; and what is used is there already. }

It might possibly be objected that it is some 'other' type of cause (e.g. noumenal) which is operative in the above derivation; that this caused the category of cause and caused this to operate in the mind and on perception, so that in mind it caused²⁹ the perception of causality. In that case, the causality in question has changed its name (even metaphorically claimed to live in another country): it is 'other', even 'noumenal'; but that is all that it has changed. The case is the same in principle. Conceive it how we will, it has this task, this work to do, this product to produce; it is spoken of precisely because this must be produced from it. Be it 'other' as it will, it incorporates all the potency of causality, and all its tasks it performs. Whatever 'other' it would aspire to be, of this we may be sure: it would be cause, incorporating in one cohesive and comprehending system all the formality it is to formulate and produce.

In independent externality, therefore, we find all that was to have been universally humanly subjectivised.

To whatever created or contingent source, with whatever such account one may seek to instance or indicate the producer of the category of causality, one is with systematic indifference debarred from this desire. The expansive category includes the account and proposed source. Unable to be captured and implanted as a form, cause remains a procedural aspect of matter itself.

As an inherent element of the created structure of material reality, we must observe, cause needs no account in terms of a contingent production of its form: we are left with the uncontingent and original institution of causality in this form pari passu with its subject matter. Before this, we conceive One productively sufficient for the form and the content, of whom they are competent and suitable creative expressions. Merely and exclusively per se, He is not necessarily, and as we observe elsewhere^30* , in some respects necessarily not, formally conformed to this mode.

Before we proceed to the related Third Antinomy, there remain two further considerations. The one has already been touched and we must develop it; the other is related.
 

4. THE EXTRADITI0N OF NOUMENA.
 

The Fifth Inconsistency .. The Extra­Systematic
 

In the preceding page, it may have been noted that the erstwhile noumenal cause was not merely conceived, and so as necessarily entailed for the operation of Kant's system; but it operated in three explicit stages consecutively italicised, and demarcated by a footnote This in itself is a further difficulty. There now our necessary nescience? We have inferentially acute comprehension: in pursuing the implications of this dualism, we find persistent neglect of our theoretical inability even to conceive a single conception concerning it. This obvious flaw in an expressed dualism we have met continually in passing. Nor is it surprising that we should do so. After all, Kant is at pains to point out his eminent lack of desire^31* to discuss 'noumena'; but he is under a necessity if he is to set up his interpretation of things at all. A justifiable and confessed embarrassment is not a logical reply.

If however it be claimed that that which we call 'noumena' does not 'exist', since existence is a mode, and hence a category of the understanding; that it cannot be conceived, since its conceptual format would involve internal correlations and interactions at least at the ideational level; that therefore it cannot be either thought or mentioned, far less argued against: then we would be prepared to agree provided that the matter were carried through consistently. If it is systematically impossible either to conceive, to make utterance concerning, or to reason about material noumena, they are thereby excluded from any theory for that very reason; and if any theory must for any reason (for example its statement) allude to them, and do so in any system involving them by whatever indirection, to that extent it must be internally inconsistent and not therefore a coherent account of things.

If therefore a system be constructed in which noumena are neither implicit nor explicit, neither mentioned nor thought nor relevant to be thought nor necessary; a theory then for which they are absolutely omitted, we might well and most relevantly make no allusion. We will therefore refrain from a criticism of noumena provided they first be surrendered as fictitious; that, after all, is our objective.
 
 

5. THE NONENITY OF NOUMENA OBJECTIVELY.
 

The Sixth Inconsistency .. The A­Systematic.

In no significant regard has Kant issued attack on the revelation of Christian­Theism,that is not ultimately bound to his phenomenal-noumenal distinction; and while perfect consistency in his theory would make this attack far more total than he would in fact have it ­ a fact which follows from Part 1 in particular above ­ even he in his formal and confined considerations is in manifest opposition to this doctrine; indeed^32* we have cited direct statement.

Accordingly we must note that for Kant's noumenal there has been a convergence of considerations arising in different ways, but compelling the same consistently contradictory conclusion.

Nor can we be much happier with the genuine reality of the noumena conceived by Kant, in so far as the mind is said to impose with impressive consistency upon the relevant and accommodatingly "raw" data, features physical, formal and procedural; for it experiences no great and significant scattering effects in its almost tyrannously invading and modally extensive creative conceptualisations. How then can the things - the autre choses - indeed be there, when we do not have these anticipated pervasive modal scattering effects, these mental diffractions, categorical deflections? How can they truly be in distinctive existence if something of a character indigenous and apt to itself, shall come upon that which is alien (ah, how immeasurably removed, yet so intimately close, these noumenal sub­strata), and encounter no radical obstruction ­ to the characterisation of these entities which exist in terms reciprocally alien to itself: to their re­characterisability in a given mould?

A fortiori: would not facts that were factual, 'pure facts' of any other sort, have form? And would not a separate, disjoined, radically an­orientated knowing agent also have form in his universe of factuality? this, even if only to the extent of knowing himself in action conformably to eventuation. The more radically disparate^33* the mode of knowledge on the one hand, and the susceptibility to knowledge through possession of distinctive or even definitive realities on the other, formally exclusive, the more certain is it that such facts (set one) would be utterly incapable of being reformed in the due form (set two) of the formative agent³³. They would, indeed, need to be formless when the ontological gulf between the categorical and the noumenal is quite radical: when the categorical, because it is such, must fail to present the noumenal.

What actually are formless facts of such infinite plasticity to productive perception for such eminently creative reconstruction?

It is no longer a matter of saying ­ Before the mind operates, we cannot have a character for them; but now we would be required to add ­ Before the mind, they have no character: for what is a fact without any specificity at all, or the existent correlate of a fact? In this, we do not think merely of the Kantian concept of a fact, but any concept, such that this correlate would not conflict immeasurably with the Kantian factualisation. If there were mass, it would have this character; or bulk, it would have that; anything thinkable or unthinkable, it is the same. Now it cannot have it: so it does not exist.
 

6. THE INADEQUATE ANTINOMY.. AN EXISTENT RESIDE
 

Kant's paralogisms and antinomies all ultimately appear to depend on just two sources of a general kind. On the one hand, they may be presented as dilemmas of reason resulting from the presupposition that the Kantian conceptualisation of the procedure operative in the production of experience in man, is correct. As such, they are readily despatched by proving that the internal and external inconsistencies or inadequacies of his theory make its pre­supposition properly disallowable. This point in the reasons above given (1 ­ 5), has already been made. We are not concerned with the sermons and stresses internal to Kant's system where it has been rendered inoperative ­ not as such. Indeed, we should expect a plethora of oddities and novelties.

Before we refer to the second general source, further, we should first proceed now to notice that Kant's theory does not assist our comprehension of the formal difficulties which scientists may find in reconciling conceptions dependent upon observation and normal transcendental activity. To the extent that the form of their understanding on which reason is thought to work, is cogently internally correlated for Kant, formal confusion is not easier, but harder to account for in terms of his theory.

On the other hand, when we observe the reasons for rejecting such a theory as Kant's in this area of activity, we find no systematic difficulty in following the time-honoured process of conflicting hypotheses relating simultaneously to the one subject­matter, each with a measure of apparent justification ­ as in the wave­particle pragmatic procedure^34* and formal impasse: we recognise that inadequate knowledge with perhaps incorrect or jejune formulations of the knowledge we have may well produce a formal impasse in which what is formally self­consistent and comprehensible in itself' may be seen to be so only when we discern the untamed empiric sufficiently and imagine with sufficient astuteness the form of what we at length verify. In principle, this is what we find and expect on a non­Kantian schema: one assigning not a formative propensity but formal validity to the type of concept which Kant would call, for example, a category. This one would assign both to non­Kantianised experience (something conceived), and to an actuality independent of man' experience ­ in terms of an existent homologue to the concept.

To revert, then, to our initial point, we must observe that where Kant implicitly or explicitly appeals to his theory touching human experience, in establishing or persisting in a paralogism or antinomy, we may now consistently and properly ignore this aspect of the difficulty, seeing it simply as an appeal to an error in indicating its correlative contradiction.

That Kant in fact conceived his special theory as at least relevant to the production of the antinomies (first source), is indeed clear from his statement regarding "these pseudo­rational assertions"^35* in which "the side permitted to open the attack is invariably victorious." The unitary synthesis is subject to pitfalls, he observes. "The conditions of this unity are such that when it is adequate to reason it is too great for the understanding; and when suited to the understanding, too small for reason. Thus there arises a conflict which cannot be avoided, do what we will." Here he is clearly invoking his concepts of the categories of the understanding and their inadmissible use transcendentally^36* . Were this his whole basis, and were we to find on inspection that his appeal in establishing antinomy and paralogism was exclusively internal to his theory, there could be no further concern for us in the matter.

However, a little further investigation indicates that not all his impasses depend on the pre­supposition of his theories; and where this is so, Kant's antinomies may well concern us yet. We must ask: Has he found ­ with or without originality, the point is indifferent ­ a flaw in the consistency of our non­Kantian approach? This represents the second potential source or ground of appeal for these Antinomies.

The paralogisms all depend for any appearance of validity on Kant's appeal to the noumenal which we have not lightly but quite emphatically disallowed; so that we may leave them precipitately as occasioning difficulty to nothing we seek to establish, and hence outside our present interest. We can in turn, pursue the internal strivings of his theory dispassionately in the First and Second Antinomies; but it is when we note that which is nearest our present specialty that we find considerable substance, or a substance of considerable importance, cited for contradiction or impasse in more than merely Kantian terms: indeed, it appears in a form apparently meaningful in our own terms in the Third Antinomy.

It may be that Kant wished to reinforce his antinomy here by reference to difficulties which he envisaged in the subject matter extrinsic to his conceptualisation hypothesis in general; or it may be that he lapsed inconsistently. We shall note a view to this former effect next: but whatever the reason for his action, we shall maintain that it was taken; apparent non­Kantian difficulties (those perceived by him but not in terms limited to his special theory) are presented. These we must answer in establishing the consistency of our coverage of this general area to which he also refers. It may be that the envisaged difficulties will be stimulating rather than provocative.

First, concerning Kant's reason for including this second type of alleged difficulty^37* , we would make a passing (though of course completely unessential) hypothesis. If in our terms he could indicate inconsistency at certain points of application, certainly this would lessen our resistance to the novelty of his theory ­ if it in turn should appear to display the consistency which he claims is the first virtue of the philosopher. It would make us less critical of such inconsistencies as we might come to observe in his system (and in all his claims there is yet often the strenuous disquietude which convinces less than its tenor alerts): it might drive us more willingly to the embrace of the after all kind­hearted critic.

It would certainly appear that Kant in his Antithetic of Pure Reason^38* is in fact reviewing the rival philosophic phalanxes of history as it would seem to him, contemplating their confusion as he deems it, from the serene clouds of Kantian perspective. He indicates with almost paternal charm: "This last decisive victory always leaves the champion of the good cause master of the field, simply because his rival is forbidden to resume the combat." He speaks in this section in habitual terms, as one providing hypotheses to account for this historic situation in ideational dispute.

Conceived as merely looking forward to the wars which would follow if people accepted his novel theory, and then failed to note his almost tediously repeated caution about the impropriety of transcendental use of the categories of the understanding or the misconception of the norms of perception: conceived merely as this, his forecast (as it would then be) would be near to ludicrous. Would there be such continued follies in mis­manipulating the Caution­marked new concepts? It would seem implausible; even if the tendency is inveterate, the caution is at least as perspicuous as his theory.

Understanding the theory, and indeed, as he appeared to envisage, accepting it: men would scarcely pursue such evils with such almost blithely incorrigible aplomb. We therefore consider that Kant definitely had in mind difficulties which he for one felt within the traditional approach to the matters itemised in his antinomies: although these were certainly not the only difficulties ­ as we have already indicated, that he had in mind with respect to them. He was envisaging a great release from historic contest not less than a proof of new troubles being provided that release might ­ if the proof were deemed valid ­ be found.

For this reason, it seems most proper to accept any form of even partial challenge from Kant's Third Antinomy: where it is initially sustainable formally because not dependent on Kant's special theory, we must face it anew, removing any support Kant may have desired ­ and probably did wish, from such considerations, and pursuing our own subject matter simultaneously.

1 This Essay is referred to in the Thesis, Predestination and Freewill, p.68, endnote 38. Its terms of reference appear in the Preface to that work.

2 Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, p.283.

3 Ibid. loc.cit..

4 This is the position of Cornelius Van Til ­ cf. his Nature and Scripture, pp.276­291, in The Infallible Word_, (REF.BIBL.41); and The Defense of the Faith, (REF.BIBL.40).

5 Predestination and Freewill, Thesis, p.68, footnote 38_.

6 Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, p.271-4.

7 Kant sometimes emphatically acknowledged that the consequences of the service of speculative and theoretical reason, wrought on the basis of the practical findings of the practical reason, included the certainty that ­there are "given supersensible objects". Theoretical reason, says he, "is compelled to admit that there are such objects" (Critique of Practical Reason, in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on The Theory of Ethics, REF.BIBL.1S, p.233, cf. p.139). The supreme being, as included, here is accorded this high, real status; but (p.200), while "freedom" is "assertorially known", "immanent" and "definitely given" along with its law and "causality" (realisable operability), this supreme being has with this groundwork a connection only, one which is "quite possible"; it must be postulated; and "it is morally necessary to assume the existence of God" (p.222).

Morals however pertain to a practical reason declared primary in cognition (p.218) in comparison with theoretical reason. At the primary level as Kant conceives it, "freedom" is more experimental than the postulates; it has immediacy for him as imperative unconditionally. For it, and for its laws and connexions (p.200), there is a practical reality which can be specified (p.146) ­ indeed, this is directly asserted of "causality free from empirical conditions". In fact, the moral law "adds a positive definition to a causality previously conceived only negatively" (p.137) ­ i.e. causal noumenon (p.146). This must "really" have effects in the "sensible" world (p.139) and in its terms, man is "defined" (p.140).

8 Cf. Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, translated by R.J. Paton in The Moral Law REF.BIBL.30, p.150; and Kant's Critique of Practica1 Reason, p.l75. See also pp.225­227 infra.

This is deemed intrinsically categorically pertinent to man; it is envisaged as unconditional moral requisition.

9 Kant's Philosophical Theory of Religion (p.360 in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works, emphasis added) states. "If the way in which it happens had been revealed at a certain time, different men at another time should form different conceptions of it, and that with all honesty". Now the hypothetical revelation, as it is here envisaged by Kant, is to show in what something enduringly relevant to mortals, consists; yet it is "perhaps .. even inevitable" that different understandings of it should follow to the point that it could not be known. It follows that for Kant revelation properly so­called is not able with any security to achieve its effects of authority and information towards man.

Körner, in Kant, REF.BIBL.22,(p.171) shows a Kantian view not amounting to acceptance of Scriptural claims even in their substance; although an indulgent, sometimes impressed and even avidly nostalgic air towards Scripture is certainly sometimes apparent (Critique of Practical Reason ­ and Other Works' pp.347­351). Where Scripture meets his view (Körner, Kant, p.170­171, letter to Lavater), it is evidently stimulating! We here also find that Kant is able to depart from basic and manifest claims of Scripture regarding Christ (e.g .ibid. para. l, p.l70 ­ contrast Acts 4:12' John 14:6; John 10:8, Isaiah 44:6­7, 48:1­16, 34:16; Psalm 119:152, Isaiah 51:6 & 16, 59:21; . Matthew 26:54, 5:17, 24; John 12:49, 16:15, 1 Corinthians 2:10­12, Matthew 11:27; John 14:7,9).

10 Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works, p.199. Kant speaks of a causality "not sensibly conditioned ­ being the causality of the acting being as belonging to the supersensible world" (p.120, emphasis added). His "fundamental law" which of course involves an abundance of intellective and interpretative categories, is "a fact of reason", the "sole fact of the pure reason".

11 ibid. p. 198.

12 Essentially the "practical imperative" as found in the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, published in B.J. Paton's Moral Law, op.cit., p.96.

13 The formulation of the "fundamental law" as found in the Critique of Practical Reason, p.ll9.

14 Cf. p.211, endnote 9 supra. Kant's formal procedure leaves God a stranger in a strange world. For the former point, there is a poignant if not piquant contrast in John (Gospel) 1:10 ­ also 1:5 &11­12. For the latter, compare Predestination and Freewill, Thesis, pp.l45-8. See also pp.237 ff. infra.

15 See endnotes 7 and 9, pp.209­211 supra.

16 Cf. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, pp.278­9, 283.

17 If Kant be right, that "consistency is the highest obligation of a philosopher" (Critique of Practical Reason, pp. 111) ­ this would be crucial. Certainly it is so on his own terms.

18 Cf. Critique of Practical Reason, p.l73; also p.l32: "Supersensible nature, so far as we can form any notion of it, is nothing else than a system of nature under the autonomy of pure Practical reason."

19 Man's "pure reason ... announces itself as originally legislative It is a matter of: "sic volo sic jubeo" (ibid. p.120).

20 Dramatically, that is its tenor as observed in Critique of Practical Reason (p.180) ­ the apostrophe to duty there appearing with divagation.

In this Work, there appears an almost monolithic solitude of morality (cf. p.172: "There is something so singular in the unbounded esteem for the pure moral law ..."). Even ­ and indeed firmly ­ in his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant adumbrates the form of this intensity, stating (immediately with reference to the future life): "This powerful and incontrovertible proof is reinforced by our ever­increasing knowledge of purposiveness.. (pp.378­380 ­ italics added). The proof there indited and submitted devolves upon "the consciousness of a righteous will" related to an "inner call" in assent ... in situ, the monolith.

21 Critique of Practical Reason, p.120.

22 See Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, p.200, for this and the quotations following in this paragraph.

23 With apologia to the Kantian astringency on the point.

24 The herbaceous equivalent of the bruited D.N.A., is illustrative in our macro-level case mentioned above.

25 The ground of teleology and theology is certainly not explicable in purely empirical terms, but it is categorically evidenced through the empirical manifold. Whatever Kant may say on teleology must comport with what he says on categories and noumena in the Critique of Pure Reason, if he is to be consistent. We have been concerned to show that in fact when we take these things together, what Kant first designated as confined to the noumenal (as to type), here invests the phenomenal and evidences itself palpably by attestation of the very categories of the understanding which allegedly invest and pre­condition the experience which they formally are said to create.

26 Of these, he says: "Thus the understanding is something more than a power of formulating rules through comparison of appearances; it is itself the lawgiver of nature" (, p.148, emphasis added), Critique of Pure Reason.

27 See Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, p.184.

28 See p.209, endnote 7 supra; and compare the considerations given on pp.225­227.

29 The labour, acuity, power, legislation, inculcation, formulation of the understanding is essential to Kant's view and expressly expounded in the Critique of Pure Reason (e.g. pp.147-8). It institutes activity and secures consequence: and its consequences are probed by reason. To this it conducts its results, and it is the cause of the adapted operability of reason (ibid. pp.303­6; 171; 173 e.g.).

This is the position of Kant; and we note that the understanding has here expressed three levels of causation in the theoretical sphere. Indeed, it is represented as accorded a status in an entire "epigenesis of reason" (ibid.p.174). With this accords the Kantian fact that reason itself may act causally on the phenomenal, albeit in terms of a practical idea (ibid. p.319).

In pursuing this aspect of Kantianism, apart from our present argument, we find a quite basic procedural incoherence in the system, at once desecrators of Kant's method and hence result.

The assertion that theoretical reason, noumenal and non­adapted to depiction, a member of the unknown "remaining things", that this functional entity exercises a statable office in a describable manner in effecting a sought end in theoretical manipulation, manifests an internal inconsistency. This noumenon we may describe in this function, in procedure, office, correlation with other activities, and even its objective. The noumenal theoretical reason can deploy categories to discipline the misuse of categories; and yet remain "for us empty", critically removed from knowledge or categorisable characterisation (cf.p.225, with endnote 31 infra). This we shall term for convenience: The Fourth Inconsistency .. The Rational.

30 See Predestination and Freewill, Section III, esp. Parts I ­ II.

31 Let us extend all fairness to Kant. He protests (Critique of Pure Reason, p.272) that the term noumena denotes a "limiting concept". Nevertheless, it is "no arbitrary invention"; and is said to be used to cover "the domain that lies beyond the sphere of appearances", which, though for Kant formally "empty", yet is, that there be that from which we may be restrained lest we go thither with our understandings; for it is not to protect what does not exist, but rather to safeguard what needs protection precisely because it exists that Kant uses the concept. These noumena then are "things in themselves", "the remaining things" (loc.cit.).

32 See p.211, endnote 9, infra.

33 If Kant should wish to represent it ­ or the Kantian (cf. Körner, Kant, pp.37­38) ­ that the noumena are unknowable for purely categorically­procedural reasons; that in fact they may (for him, in theory, unverifiably) 'happen' to consist in a very considerable conformity to the 'pedestrian' categories of the 'understanding': then of course to the extent that they do, their noumenality, often discarded as formally illusory becomes actually factitious.

On the other hand, a significant difference (i.e. in the 'categories operative in the two regions) pro tanto permits the noumena hypothetically, only that they may be destroyed logically: for in that event, the applicability directly of the argument in view, is re­established.

34 Cf. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1963, Vol.14, p.81.

35 See Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, p.394 for this and the two quotations following.

36 Ibid. p.265.

37 Conceived here as such for the reasons given in the succeeding paragraph.

38 Critique of Pure Reason, pp.393­6.

39 The relevant principle of pure understanding may indeed be said to be regulative, rather than constitutive, the term employed in the case of time and space "categories"; however, causality is, in Kant's work, formally constitutive (with its co­members) in experience of sensibilia, in that such experience is required to conform to the formal necessity of these principles and to be constructed through the functioning of the impress of these categories. Thus Kant can say: "Thus the understanding is ... the lawgiver of nature" (cf. p.222, endnote 26, supra).

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