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It is quite plain, therefore, that King has assumed the thing to be proved in his first argument, or argument a priori. For he proceeds upon the postulates that the Deity is infinitely good, and that he only had human happiness in view when he made the world. Either supposition would have served his purpose; and making either would have been taking for granted the whole matter in dispute.
Each party took the recorded facts and interpreted them in accordance with their notion of what a mediator should be. Both parties studied the same facts; but the a priori of their thought differed, and so their conclusions differed. In the realm of Christology this a priori of thought is of paramount importance. Preconceived opinions inevitably colour our mental picture of Christ.
The true plan was not to throw experience aside because it was alleged by the ignorant and the prejudiced, but to interrogate experience systematically, and so to become the Bacon or the Newton of legislation, instead of wandering off into the a priori constructions of a Descartes or a Leibniz.
But transcendental philosophy has this peculiarity, that besides indicating the rule, or rather the general condition for rules, which is given in the pure conception of the understanding, it can, at the same time, indicate a priori the case to which the rule must be applied.
And such mere methodised savagery was to discover the hidden things of nature better than a priori deductions from the nature of Ormuzd perhaps to give a history of the past, in which Oannes would be altogether ignored! Decidedly it were better to burn this man at once.
Although these may be better than nothing, yet they can never afford principles dictated by reason, which must have their source wholly a priori and thence their commanding authority, expecting everything from the supremacy of the law and the due respect for it, nothing from inclination, or else condemning the man to self-contempt and inward abhorrence.
Thus the chief of the Scotch school, without considering at all the inequality of skill or labor, posits a priori the equality of the means of labor, abandoning thereafter to each laborer the care of his own person, after the eternal axiom: WHOSO DOES WELL, SHALL FARE WELL. The philosopher Reid is lacking, not in knowledge of the principle, but in courage to pursue it to its ultimate.
"You are asking me for an incriminating statement," said he, "delivered in the presence of a witness too. But, as a matter of fact, there is no use in speculating a priori; we should have to reconstruct a purely imaginary situation, the circumstances of which are unknown to us, and we should almost certainly reconstruct it wrong.
It liberates the mind from the oppressive necessity of regarding Space as still somehow objectively extending and containing the real world. It also relieves an obvious difficulty which confronts the Philosophy of Schopenhauer in locating those transcendental forms of the phenomenon which are imposed a priori upon the presentation, and yet are not to be found in the pure Volition.
But man has no right to have 'clear ideas of the possible and impossible, like Faraday, a priori, except in the exact sciences. There are other instances of weak evidence which satisfies psychologists. Hamilton has an anecdote, borrowed from Monboddo, who got it from Mr. Hans Stanley, who, 'about twenty-six years ago, heard it from the subject of the story, Madame de Laval.
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