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

That excellent book by Thomas Reid, the " Inquiry into the Human Mind" (first edition, 1764; 6th edition, 18 10), as a negative proof of the Kantian truths, affords us a very thorough conviction of the inadequacy of the senses to produce the objective perception of things, and also of the nonempirical origin of the perception of space and time. Reid refutes Locke's doctrine that perception is a product of the senses, by a thorough and acute demonstration that the collective sensations of the senses do not bear the least resemblance to the world aj known in perception, and especially that the five primary qualities of Locke (extension, form, solidity, movement, and number) absolutely could not be afforded us by any sensation of the senses. Accordingly he gives up the question as to the mode of origination and the source of perception as completely insoluble ; and although altogether unacquainted with Kant, he gives us, as it were, according to the regvXa falsi, a thorough proof of the intellectual nature of perception (really first explained by me as a consequence of the Kantian doctrine), and also of the o priori source, discovered by Kant, of its constituent elements, space, time, and causality, from which those primary qualities of Locke first proceed, but by means of which they are easily constructed. Thomas Reid's book is very instructive and well worth reading — ten times more so than all the philosophy together that has

p. 187

been written since Kant.

Another indirect proof of the same doctrine, though in the way of error, is afforded by the French sensational philosophers, who, since Condillac trod in the footsteps of Locke, have laboured to show once for all that the whole of our perception and thinking can be referred to mere sensations (penser c'est sentir), which, after Locke's example, they call ide'es simples, and through the mere coming together and comparison of which the whole objective world is supposed to build itself up in our heads.

These gentlemen certainly have des ide'es Men simples. It is amusing to see how, lacking alike the profundity of the German and the honesty of the English philosopher, they turn the poor material of sensation this way and that way, and try to increase its importance, in order to construct out of it the deeply significant phenomena of the world of perception and thought.

But the man constructed by them would necessarily be an Anencephalus, a Ttte de crapaud, with only organs of sense and without a brain. To take only a couple of the better attempts of this sort out of a multitude of others, I may mention as examples Condorcet at the beginning of his book, "Des Progress de V Esprit Humain," and Tourtual on Sight, in the second volume of the " Scriptores Ophthalmologic Minores" edidit Justus Radiits (1828).

The feeling of the insufficiency of a purely sensationalists explanation of perception is in like manner shown in the assertion which was made shortly before the appearance of the Kantian philosophy, that we not only have ideas of things called forth by sensation, but apprehend the things themselves directly, although they lie outside us — which is certainly inconceivable. And this was not meant in some idealistic sense, but was said from the point of view of common realism. This assertion is well and pointedly put by the celebrated Euler in his " Letters to a German Princess," vol. ii. p. 68. He says : " I therefore believe that the sensations (of the senses) contain something more than philosophers imagine. They are not

p. 1