The World as Will and Idea, Vol. II — Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Haldane & Kemp

If, now, we endeavour to investigate Kant's inmost meaning, not clearly expressed by himself, we find that in reality such an object, different from the perceptioi but which is by no means a conception, is for him the proper object for the understanding ; indeed that it must be by means of the strange assumption of such an object, which cannot be presented in perception, that the pertat

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ception first becomes experience. I believe that an old deeply-rooted prejudice in Kant, dead to all investigation, is the ultimate reason of the assumption of such an absolute object, which is an object in itself, i.e., without a subject.

It is certainly not the perceived object, but through the conception it is added to the perception by thought, as something corresponding to it; and now the perception is experience, and has value and truth, which it thus only receives through the relation to a conception (in diametrical opposition to my exposition, according to which the conception only receives value and truth from the perception).

It is then the proper function of the categories to add on in thought to the perception this directly non-perceptible object. " The object is given only through perception, and is afterwards thought in accordance with the category" (Critique of Pure Reason, first edition, p. 399).

This is made specially clear by a passage on p. 125 of the fifth edition : " Now the question arises whether conceptions a priori do not also come first as conditions under which alone a thing can be, not perceived certainly, but yet thought as an object in general," which he answers in the affirmative. Here the source of the error and the confusion in which it is involved shows itself distinctly.

For the object as such exists always only for perception and in it ; it may now be completed through the senses, or, when it is absent, through the imagination. "What is thought, on the contrary, is always an universal non-perceptible conception, which certainly can be the conception of an object in general ; but only indirectly by means of conceptions does thought relate itself to objects, which always are and remain perceptible.

For our thinking is not able to impart reality to perceptions ; this they have, so far as they are capable of it (empirical reality) of themselves ; but it serves to bring together the common element and the results of perceptions, in order to preserve them, and to be able to use them more easily. But Kant ascribes the objects themselves to thought, in order to make expe40 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.

rience and the objective world dependent upon under" standing, yet without allowing understanding to be a faculty of perception. In this relation he certainly distinguishes perception from thought, but he makes particular things sometimes the object of perception and sometimes the object of thought.

In reality, however, they are only the object of the former; our empirical perception is at once objective, just because it proceeds from the causal nexus. Things, not ideas different from them, are directly its object. Particular things as such are perceived in the understanding and through the senses; the one-sided impression upon the latter is at once completed by the imagination.

But, on the contrary, as soon as we pass over to thought, we leave the particular things, and have to do with general conceptions, which cannot be presented in perception, although we afterwards apply the results of our thought to particular things.

If we hold firmly to this, the inadmissibleness of the assumption becomes evident that the perception of things only obtains reality and becomes experience through the thought of these very things applying its twelve categories.

Rather in perception itself the empirical reality, and consequently experience, is already given ; but the perception itself can only come into existence by the application to sensation of the knowledge of the causal nexus, which is the one function of the understanding. Perception is accordingly in reality intellectual, which is just what Kant denies.