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

The refutation of rational psychology is much fuller and more thorough in the first edition of the " Critique of Pure Keason " than in the second and following editions, and therefore upon this point we must make use of the first edition exclusively. This refutation has as a whole very great merit and much truth. Yet I am clearly of opinion that it was merely from his love of symmetry that Kant deduced as necessary the conception of the soul from the paralogism of substantiality by applying the demand for the unconditioned to the conception substance, which is the first category of relation, and accordingly maintained that the conception of a sou] arose in this way in every speculative reason. If this conception really had its origin in the presupposition of t final subject of all predicates of a thing, one would have assumed a soul not in men alone, but also just as necessarily in every lifeless thing, for such a thing also require* a final subject of all its predicates. Speaking generally however, Kant makes use of a quite inadmissible ex pression when he talks of something which can exis only as subject and not as predicate (e.g., Critique o Pure Reason, p. 323; V. 412; Prolegomena, § 4 am

p. 101

47) ; though a precedent for this is to be found in Aristotle's "Metaphysics," iv. ch. 8. Nothing whatever exists as subject and predicate, for these expressions belong exclusively to logic, and denote the relations of abstract conceptions to each other. Now their correlative or representative in the world of perception must be substance and accident.

But then we need not look further for that which exists always as substance and never as accident, but have it directly in matter. It is the substance corresponding to all properties of things which are their accidents.

It is, in fact, if one wishes to retain the .expression of Kant which has just been condemned, the final subject of all predicates of that empirically given thing, that which remains after the abstraction of all its properties of every kind. And this holds good of man as of a brute, a plant, or a stone, and is so evident, that in order not to see it a determined desire not to see is required.

That it is really the prototype of the conception substance, I will show soon. But subject and predicate are related to substance and accident rather as the principle of sufficient reason in logic to the law of causality in nature, and the substitution or identification of the former is just as inadmissible as that of the latter.

Yet in the "Prolegomena," § 46, Kant carries this substitution and identification to its fullest extent in order to make the conception of the soul arise from that of the final subject of all predicates and from the form of the categorical syllogism.

In order to discover the sophistical nature of this paragraph, one only needs to reflect that subject and predicate are purely logical determinations, which concern abstract conceptions solely and alone, and that according to their relation in the judgment. Substance and accident, on the other hand, belong to the world of perception and its apprehension in the understanding, and are even there only as identical with matter and form or quality. Of this more shortly. The antithesis which has given occasion for the assunip102 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.

tion of two fundamentally different substances, body aud soul, is in truth that of objective and subjective.

If a man apprehends himself objectively in external perception, he finds a being extended in space and in general merely corporeal ; but if, on the other hand, he apprehends himself in mere self-consciousness, thus purely subjectively, he finds himself a merely willing and perceiving being, free from all forms of perception, thus also without a single one of the properties which belong to bodies.

Now he forms the conception of the soul, like all the transcendental conceptions called by Kant Ideas, by applying the principle of sufficient reason, the form of all objects, to that which is not an object, and in this case indeed to the subject of knowing and willing.

He treats, in fact, knowing, thinking, and willing as effects of which he seeks the cause, and as he cannot accept the body as their cause, he assumes a cause of them entirely different from the body. In this manner the first and the last of the dogmatists proves the existence of the soul : Plato in the " Phsedrus " and also Wolf : from thinking and willing at the effects which lead to that cause.

Only after in thi$ way, by hypostatising a cause corresponding to the effect the conception of an immaterial, simple, indestructibli being had arisen, the school developed and demonstrate this from the conception of substance. But this conceptioi itself they had previously constructed specially for thi purpose by the following artifice, which is worthy c notice.