LITMIR.BIZ

      EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

       Table of Contents

      There are not wanting indications that public interest in the Critical Philosophy has been quickened of recent days in these countries, as well as in America. To lighten the toil of penetrating through the wilderness of Kant’s long sentences, the English student has now many aids, which those who began their studies fifteen or twenty years ago did not enjoy. Translations, paraphrases, criticisms, have been published in considerable numbers; so that if it is not yet true that “he who runs may read,” it may at least be said that a patient student of ordinary industry and intelligence has his way made plain before him. And yet the very number of aids is dangerous. Whatever may be the value of short and easy handbooks in other departments of science, it is certain that no man will become a philosopher, no man will even acquire a satisfactory knowledge of the history of philosophy, without personal and prolonged study of the ipsissima verba of the great masters of human thought. “Above all,” said Schopenhauer, “my truth-seeking young friends, beware of letting our professors tell you what is contained in the Critique of the Pure Reason”; and the advice has not become less wholesome with the lapse of years. The fact, however, that many persons have not sufficient familiarity with German to enable them to study German Philosophy in the original with ease, makes translations an educational necessity; and this translation of Kant’s Critique of the faculty of Judgement has been undertaken in the hope that it may promote a more general study of that masterpiece. If any reader wishes to follow Schopenhauer’s advice, he has only to omit the whole of this prefatory matter and proceed at once to the Author’s laborious Introduction.

      It is somewhat surprising that the Critique of Judgement has never yet been made accessible to the English reader. Dr. Watson has indeed translated a few selected passages, so also has Dr. Caird in his valuable account of the Kantian philosophy, and I have found their renderings of considerable service; but the space devoted by both writers to the Critique of Judgement is very small in comparison with that given to the Critiques of Pure and Practical Reason. And yet the work is not an unimportant one. Kant himself regarded it as the coping-stone of his

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