The impact of Kant's critique of metaphysics is deeply ambiguous. A vivid assessment by a distinguished and relatively sympathetic British reader in the mid-nineteenth century may still reflect the opinion of most analytic philosophers today. According to Sir William Hamilton, “Kant had annihilated the older metaphysic, but the germ of a more visionary doctrine of the absolute, than any of those refuted, was contained in the bosom of his own philosophy. He had slain the body, but had not exorcised the spectre of the absolute; and this spectre continued to haunt the schools of Germany even to the present day.”

Hamilton’s words still provide a helpful structure for trying to understand and evaluate the full effect of Kant’s treatment of metaphysics. They raise a set of unavoidable questions:

1. What is the “older metaphysic” under attack by the Critique, and how does it express what can appear to be the “body” of the “absolute”? (See below, I, The Prelude of Kant’s Critique.)

2. How does Kant’s attack proceed?

3. Does it truly “annihilate” this “body”? (See below, II and III, The Process of Kant’s Critique and The Result of the Dialectic.)

4. What is the “germ” in the “bosom” of Kant’s own philosophy that can appear as a “spectre of the absolute,” an absolute “more visionary” than anything in the “older metaphysic”? (See below, IV, The Poison of Kant’s Critique.)

5. How did this “spectre” develop after the Critique, and what is the relation of that development to the Critique’s own basic position on metaphysics? (See below, V, Kantian Postlude.)