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

Note. — As a warning against a false path and to illustrate the above, I mention S. Stern's " Vorlavfige Grundlage zur SpracJiphilosophie," 1835, which is an utterly abortive attempt to construct the categories out of the grammatical forms. He has entirely confused thought with perception, and therefore, instead of the categories of thought, he has tried to deduce the supposed categories of perception from the grammatical forms, and consequently has placed the grammatical forms in direct relation to perception. He is involved in the great error that language is immediately related to perception, instead of being directly related only to thought as such, thus to the abstract concepts, and only by means of these to perception, to which they, however, have a relation which introduces an entire change of the form. What exists in perception, thus also the relations which proceed from time and space, certainly becomes an object of thought; thus there must also be forms of speech to express it, yet always merely in the abstract, as concepts. Concepts are always the primary material of thought, and the forms of logic are always related to these, never directly to perception. Perception always determines only the material, never the formal truth of the proposition, for the formal truth is determined according to the logical rules alone.

I return to the Kantian philosophy, and come now to the Transcendental Dialectic. Kant opens it with the explanation of reason, the faculty which is to play the principal part in it, for hitherto only sensibility and understanding were on the scene. When considering his different explanations of reason, I have already spoken above of the explanation he gives here that "it is the

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faculty of principles. It is now taught here that all the a priori knowledge hitherto considered, which makes pure mathematics and pure natural science possible, affords only rules, and no principles; because it proceeds from perceptions and forms of knowledge, and not from mere conceptions, which is demanded if it is to be called a principle. Such a principle must accordingly be knowledge from pure conceptions and yet synthetical.

But this is absolutely impossible. From pure conceptions nothing but analytical propositions can ever proceed.

If conceptions are to be synthetically and yet a priori combined, this combination must necessarily be accomplished by some third thing, through a pure perception of the formal possibility of experience, just as synthetic judgments a posteriori are brought about through empirical perception ; consequently a synthetic proposition a priori can never proceed from pure conceptions.

In general, however, we are a priori conscious of nothing more than the i principle of sufficient reason in its different forms, and therefore no other synthetic judgments a priori are possible than those which proceed from that which receives its content from that principle.

However, Kant finally comes forward with a pretended principle of the reason answering to his demand, yet only with this one, from which others afterwards follow si corollaries. It is the principle which Chr. Wolf set up and explained in his " Cosmologia," sect. i. c 2, § 93, and in his " Ontologia" § 178. As now above, under the title of the Amphiboly, mere Leibnitzian philosophemes were taken for natural and necessary aberrations of the reason and were criticised as such, so here precisely the same thing happens with the philosophemes of Wolf. Kanl: still presents this principle of the reason in an obscure light, through indistinctness, indefiniteness, and breaking of it up (p. 307; V. 361, and 322; V. 379). Clearly expressed, however, it is as follows : " If the conditioned i: given, the totality of its conditions must also be giveo

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