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To the special student of Kant, the difficulties which must attend the attempt to furnish a summary account of the "special substance and purport" of the "Critique of pure reason" are well known. Not the least of these difficulties arises from the circumstance that Kant's work marks and conspicuously illustrates a stadium of transition in the history of modern thought. It is far more eminently the story of a process of inquiry and demonstration than a didactic exposition of finished results; And with reference to this process the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quern are widely different. Hence, as the inquiry proceeds, words and phrases acquire, and have attached to them, new meanings. This produces an air of variability and uncertainty in the use of words, which Kant, owing, doubtless, in part, to the haste with which his work was written, has not taken care to reduce to a minimum. Add to this the fact that Kant's intellectual attitude, in some of its most essential aspects, remains, to the end, thoroughly confused, and the reader will have some conception of the hindrances which lie in the way of an attempt to produce a "clear and attractive statement" of what Kant has to say. These things are mentioned, not to excuse any deficiencies in the work of the present author, but that the critical reader may not at the outset form a wholly unreasonable notion of what may justly be demanded in any professed exposition of Kant. The author has had at his disposal a copious collection of works, old and new, relating to Kant. But as his primary object in the preparation of this volume was hot to make a new contribution to "Kant philology," they could not serve him, or influence his judgment, in any such conspicuous measure as to make further, specific mention of them necessary. His best and most earnest wish is that this volume, and the series which it inaugurates, may serve the end of promoting genuine philosophic intelligence.

Kant, Immanuel,