THE KANTIAN REVOLUTION
One of the most famous of Kant’s remarks was that he proposed to effect a Copernican Revolution in thought. As Copernicus had established a new center for the planetary system, so he proposed to establish a new center for knowledge. This new center was to be the mind itself. The errors of the earlier period had been largely due, he thought, to the attempt to make knowledge center in the object, it being expected that the mind should reflect, either by perception or reason, the nature of an outward and independently existing thing. This method leads inevitably, said Kant, either to scepticism or to what is just as bad for philosophical purposes, dogmatism. The new way is to expect that the object shall conform to the mind. Thus nature, which in the earlier view was construed as an external order by which the mind is affected, or which the mind is somehow to reproduce by its own ratiocination, is now construed as the original creation of the mind. It owes all of its arrangements and connections, even its very distribution in space and time, to the constitution of the knower. The mind imposes its conditions on the object, and thus gets out of nature what it has already put into it. The bearing of this on man’s spiritual claims is apparent. It is now nature that is creature; and man, in virtue of his intelligence, that is creator. The fatal world of fact and necessity, that seemed so alien to spirit, turns out to be but an expression of the intellectual part of spirit.