A HOUSE
O~
THiORY
21
the
latter) develops an almost excessive fear of imprecrnon.
"Everything that can be said can be said clearly." Outside
the
small area of possible clarity lies the dangerous region of "mushy"
thinking from which attention is averted. The ideal is a demonstra–
tion, however tiny, which is clean, sterile and conclusive.
In considering the way in which the modem techniques
have affected moral and political theory, and through them affected a
range of less specialized theorizing, it is necessary to consider in
more detail the "elimination of metaphysics." In the past philoso–
phers had invented concepts expressive of moral belief and pre–
sented them as
if
they were facts concerning the nature of the
mind or of the world. Philosophy since Hume has, in opposing
dogmatic rationalist metaphysics in general, been critical of this
tendency, but in varying ways. Briefly, criticism of metaphysics may
proceed along Humian, Kantian, or Hegelian lines. Hume, who
wished to maintain as rigorously as possible that we know only what
our senses tell us, denied the existence of moral "facts" or "realities,"
analyzed moral concepts into non-rational feelings and imaginative
habits, and was prepared to let basic empirical concepts suffer the
same fate. Kant, anxious to defend both the reality of our empirical
knowledge and the dignity of our moral intimations, changed
Hume's habits of imagination into "categories," or fixed formal
modes of apprehension which
if
directed upon empirical data would
yield knowledge. Other matters, such as the moral law and the
destiny of the soul, could only be objects of belief, aJthough the
reality .and something of the nature of the spiritual realm were
suggested by the demands of conscience. Hegel altered Kant's
criticism in a fundamental way when he conceived the categories
as the forms not only of our knowledge of empirical objects, but
also of our apprehension of social, psychological and spiritual realities,
and subjected them to historical treatment, taking the pattern of
their development initially from the history of the changing ideas
of the human race.
These philosophers were all critical of dogmatic rationalist
metaphysical arguments (such as those used by St. Thomas) and
so put a question mark beside moral beliefs (ethical, political,
religious) which rested formerly on such arguments; but they"
dif-
