Paul Brunton Philosophic Foundation homepage > Notebooks of Paul Brunton



A shy little man shocked the Western world of metaphysicians with his critical analysis of the very foundations of their knowledge. Such was Immanuel Kant and such was the startling effect of his magnum opus, The Critique of Pure Reason, which appeared in 1781 to amaze the learned. It was the logical, if late, result of the purpose fixed thirty-five years earlier, when Kant wrote to someone: "I will enter on my course and nothing will prevent me from pursuing it. I have already fixed upon the line which I am resolved to keep." He gave European thinkers a nut on which many have broken their teeth, though none have yet succeeded in breaking the nut. He indicated the limits of the human mind and proved, as conclusively as it can be proved, that human reason was utterly unable to penetrate into the reality of things, which necessarily transcends it.

He courageously accepted the conclusions of his own rigorous reasoning. He admitted that metaphysics as a science transcending all sciences, as an intellectual quest of God, was doomed to failure. The rational could never discover the Suprarational.

Kant, after all, was a rationalist. He worked primarily with purely intellectual concepts not with mystical ones. Consequently he shared the limitations of such a narrow standpoint. He recognized that his ideas pointed beyond themselves, but he did not venture to make the journey himself. Besides, professors have to consider their posts first and truth afterwards and truth often comes off second best. But Kant, being a thoroughly honest man who had already found that the full and free expression of his views brought threats of dismissal from the State authorities, probably refrained from entering religious mysticism and fell into silence about it because the intellectual revolution he advocated was itself a tremendous enough advance. He used logical reasoning to show that what lay beneath all our reasoning was beyond our knowing, that the essence of existence was beyond finite perception, but he did not say that there was no essence. It is there, whether we know it or not.

-- Notebooks Category 7: The Intellect > Chapter 7 : Metaphysics of Truth > # 108