concealed by the literary skill of the philosopher, though the
wisdom of such concealment is open to doubt. It is so easy not to
see the difficulties of Hume. But certainly Kant is uncom-
promising. He makes no attempt to conceal either from his reader
or from himself the necessarily arduous character of the work on
which he is engaged, and deliberately rejects the temptation to
make it appear any more simple than it is. ¹ This attitude may be
misguided but it is not culpable. The charge against Kant, how-
ever, is not that he is difficult, but that the difficulty is superfluous
and that what he had to say might have been, and therefore ought
to have been, expressed in more simple and lucid terms. I believe
that this charge cannot be sustained, and that those who make it
fall to distinguish between two quite different inquiries, namely
(1) 'What precisely were the questions which Kant was trying to
answer and what was his answer to them?' and (2) 'Are Kant's
answers to his questions relevant to the questions which I am
trying to answer for myself?' These are both sensible, but what
is not sensible is to ask 'Did Kant solve the problem of causality?'
for this implies that there exist for philosophy, as there do for
arithmetic, problems which have no historical context and are
therefore capable of being asked and answered in the twentieth
century in precisely the same terms as they might have been asked
and answered by a competent calculator three hundred years
before. If Kant ever set himself to calculate the square root of
two to ten places of decimals, he either got the answer right or
he did not: and whether he did or not, he might be properly
criticized now for the clumsiness of the method which he employed.
But to suppose that there is a 'problem of causality' or 'problem
of the interrelation of mind and body' which presents itself un-
altered to succeeding generations of human beings is mere moon-
shine. The verbal form of the question may be identical, but that
is all. It is therefore neither fair nor useful to analyse the work of
Kant or any other philosopher into (a) the eternal problems to
which he was trying to find an answer and (b) the historically
conditioned and irrelevant form in which his answer is presented.
We cannot discard the latter and retain the former, for the former
have no existence. They are merely our own favourite difficulties
pretending to universal and timeless relevance.

Consequently the work of any great philosopher is doubly hard
to understand. His problems were intrinsically difficult, or he

-2-