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is a sort of Nihilism for which neither the external world nor the Self or Atma has any reality What really exists is a stream of momentary and mental impressions and nothing more. Thus the English empiricism practically ends in the denial of both the self and the external world.
THE GERMAN IDEALISM
Hume's sceptical analysis resulted in reducing not only the Law of Causation to an empty mental habit but also in rejecting all propositions such as mathematical ones which are considered absolutely certain and unchallengeable. Propositions in mathematics according to Hume depend upon the same mental habit which is the foundation of the Law of Causation. We have been accustomed to observe for example the angles of a triangle are together equal to two right angles. Merely because the fact that this proposition has been observed to be true in the past in all cases that we examined, it does not follow that it would be true in other cases. Thus even mathematical propositions according to Hume are only highly probable statements but not necessarily binding on the human intellect to be absolutely true. This sceptical result obtained by Hume was the starting point of idealism. Immanuel Kant, the great German philosopher admits that he was roused from his dogmatic slumber by Hume. According to Kant, Hume's result though logically inevitable from the Neither empirical assumptions shows the frustration of reason. the dogmatic philosophy of Descartes nor the sceptical philosophy of Hume would be a satisfactory solution of the metaphysical problem. Kant therefore attempted to reconstruct metaphysics in such a way as to avoid both these extremes. As he himself confesses "The starry heavens above and the moral law within always fill me with awe and reverence". His task as a philosopher therefore is to explain nature and constitution of the cosmos and understand and explain the significance of the moral Law. The former he takes up in his first book of Pure Reason and the latter he takes up in his second book of Practical Reason. His attempt to salvage metaphysics from Humean scepticism constrains him to examine first the foundations of
INTRODUCTION
