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

representative of it. I have already adduced what is needful on this point in my essay on the principle of sufficient reason, § 28. Kant calls a fleeting phantasy of this kind a schema, in opposition to the perfected picture of the imagination.

He says it is like a monogram of the imagination, and asserts that just as such a schema stands midway between our abstract thinking of empirically obtained conceptions, and our clear perception which comes to us through the senses, so there are a priori schemata of the pure conceptions of the understanding between the faculty of perception a priori of pure sensibility and the faculty of thinking a priori of the pure understanding (thus the categories).

These schemata, as. monograms of the pure imagination a priori, he describes one by one, and assigns to each of them its corresponding category, in the wonderful "Chapter on the Schematism of the Pure Conceptions of the Understanding," which is noted as exceedingly obscure, because no man has ever been able to make anything out of it.

Its obscurity, however, vanishes if it is considered from the point of view here indicated, but there also comes out more clearly in it than anywhere else the intentional nature of Kant's procedure, and of the determination formed beforehand of finding what would correspond to the analogy, and could assist the architectonic symmetry ; indeed this is here the case to such a degree as to be almost comical.

For when he assumes schemata of the pure (empty) a priori conceptions of the understanding (categories) analogous to the empirical schemata (or representatives through the fancy of our actual conceptions), he overlooks the fact that the end of such schemata is here entirely wanting. For the end of the schemata in the case of empirical (real) thinking is entirely connected with the material content of such conceptions.

For since these conceptions are drawn from empirical perception, we assist and guide ourselves when engaged in abstract thinking by now and then casting a momentary glance back at vol. 11. D 2the perception out of which the conceptions are framed, in order to assure ourselves that our thought has still real content. This, however, necessarily presupposes that the conceptions which occupy us are sprung from perception, and it is merely a glance back at their material content, indeed a mere aid to our weakness. But in the case of a priori conceptions which as yet have no content at all, clearly this is necessarily omitted.

For these conceptions are not sprung from perception, but come to it from within, in order to receive a content first from it. Thus they have as yet nothing on which they could look back.

I speak fully upon this point, because it is just this that throws light upon the secret origin of the Kantian philosophising, which accordingly consists in this, tha Kant, after the happy discovery of the two forms of intuition or perception a priori, exerted himself, under the guidance of the analogy, to prove that for every determination of our empirical knowledge there is an a priori analogue, and this finally extended, in the schemata, even to a mere psychological fact.

Here the apparent depth and the difficulty of the exposition just serve to conceal from the reader that its content remains a wholly undemonstrable and merely arbitrary assumption. But he who has penetrated at last to the meaning of such an exposition is then easily induced to mistake this under- i standing so painfully attained for a conviction of the truth of the matter.

If, on the contrary, Kant had kept j himself here as unprejudiced and purely observant as in { the discovery of a priori intuition or perception, he must j have found that what is added to the pure intuition or perception of space and time, if an empirical perception arises from it, is on the one hand the sensation, and on 1 other hand the knowledge of causality, which changes the mere sensation into objective empirical perception, but just on this account is not first derived and learned froir sensation, but exists a priori, and is indeed the form anc function of the pure understanding. It is also, however