Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience, A Commentary on the First Half of the Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (review)

498 BOOK REVIEWS being the most powerful means of living a life of union with God, united as we are through the Mass to the mystical Body of Christ. This new work of Father Garrigou-Lagrange certainly deserves the effort of an attentive study. It contains nothing that a priest with charge of souls ought not to be thoroughly acquainted with. It will help him to unravel the difficulties with which he is bound to be faced in directing those souls whom God has called to a more perfect life and who have a right to expect from him guidance and enlightenment. ~ Piazza Salerno, Rome, Italy HILARY MoRRIS, 0. S. M. Kant's Metaphysic of Experience, A Commentary on the First Half of the Kritik der Reinen Vernunft. New York: The Macmillan Company; 1951, ~ vols. Pp. 585, and 510. The reprinting of Professor Paton's Commentary again makes available one of the finest of all Kantian studies, and the only true, detailed and complete commentary (Vaihinger's work is unfinished}. Fe:w are so well qualified for such a work as this author, whose works on Kant's moral philosophy are classics in their field, and it is rare to find one who can expose another's thought with the understanding, precisililn and lucidity of Paton. It is not an easy task to write a.commentary to Kant's Kritik, but rather a very difficult one. There is the problem of a very complex doctrine, 'to whieh may be added the difficulty of a language and expression sometimes not merely ambiguous but, at times, simply misleading and equivocal. These difficulties are complicated by the important problem of the historical interpretation of the doctrine of Kant, on which there are many and varied theories. Nevertheless, Paton seems to have handled these problems with success, due to his adhering to a determination to write a commentary and just that, as well as to his own undoubted ability. Paton's work is not, and is not meant to. be, a justification of Kant's doctrine any more than is it an attack on this teaching. The aim of these volumes is to explain in as faithful and intelligible a manner as possible the first half of the monumental Kritik. It is impossible, and likewise needless, to try to give a full account of this work, for this would involve a complete exposition of the Kantian theory of knowledge. Instead it seems preferable to explain what was meant by saying that Paton's Commentary is a faithful and intelligible guide to Kant's thought. It is faithful inasmuch as the author explains the doctrine of Kant himself, and not the doctrine which might be derived, and has been BOOK REVIEWS 499 derived, from it. It is unnecessary to mention that the name " Kantian idealism" applies to a large number of different tendencies in interpreting Kant, all of which, as one might presume, claim to be the only proper understanding of the common master. It is not easy to abstract from these various interpretations-past and present-but Paton, as a Kantian scholar, knew them well enought to avoid their influence. His work is based directly on the text of the Kritik. To this fidelity goes the credit for the excellent remarks on the nature of the critical problem according to Kant (Vol. I, chaps. ll and HI) , on the principle of solution of this problem (Chap. XXXV, especially § 4-6), and on the importance of the" thirig in itself" (Ding an sick) in the philosophy of Kant (chaps. LV-LVI). With regard to this latter point, it seems quite certain, in spite of some rather tendentious interpretations of several obscure passages, that Kant never questioned the existence of the thing-in-itself. He did not question it at the beginning of his work, for the very critical problem in his formulation (Are synthetic a priori judgments possible?) supposes the existence of the thing-in-itself, or of transcendent reality, and this belief he never relinquished, so that Paton's words are quite correct: " In Kant's whole discussion of phenomena and noumena I can see no suggestion that he gave up for a moment...