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80 20 [Note on Kant’s Refutation of Idealism] c. 1890 Houghton Library Kant’s refutation of idealism in the second edition of the Critic of the Pure Reason has been often held to be inconsistent with his main position or even to be knowingly sophistical. It appears to me to be one of the numerous passages in that work which betray an elaborated and vigorous analysis, marred in the exposition by the attempt to state the argument more abstractly and demonstratively than the thought would warrant. In “Note 1,” Kant says that his argument beats idealism at its own game. How is that? The idealist says that all that we know immediately, that is, otherwise than inferentially, is what is present in the mind; and things out of the mind are not so present. The whole idealist position turns upon this conception of the present. Obviously, then, the first move toward beating idealism at its own game is to remark that we apprehend our own ideas only as flowing in time, and since neither the future nor the past, however near they may be, is present, there is as much difficulty in conceiving our perception of what passes within us as in conceiving external perception. If so, replies the idealist, instead of giving up idealism we must go still further to nihilism. Kant does not notice this retort; but it is clear from his footnote that he would have said: Not so; for it is impossible we should so much as think we think in time unless we do think in time; or rather, dismissing blind impossibility , the mere imagination of time is a clear perception of the past. Hamilton stupidly objects to Reid’s phrase “immediate memory”; but an immediate, intuitive, consciousness of time clearly exists wherever time exists. But once grant immediate knowledge in time, and what becomes of the idealist theory that we immediately know only the present? For the present can contain no time. ...

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