Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 14, 2025
Its principles are merely principles of the exposition of phenomena, and the proud name of an ontology, which professes to present synthetical cognitions a priori of things in general in a systematic doctrine, must give place to the modest title of analytic of the pure understanding. Thought is the act of referring a given intuition to an object.
It is therefore manifest that there can only be a transcendental deduction of these conceptions and by no means an empirical one; also, that all attempts at an empirical deduction, in regard to pure a priori conceptions, are vain, and can only be made by one who does not understand the altogether peculiar nature of these cognitions.
Such judgments, in so far as they are not based on higher and more general cognitions, are termed "principles," and the system of them to be given, with the table of the categories as a guide, in the Analytic of Principles or the Doctrine of the Faculty of Judgment furnishes the outlines of "pure natural science."
We are actually in possession of a priori synthetical cognitions, as is proved by the existence of the principles of the understanding, which anticipate experience.
The latter mode of thought is evidently based upon a logical principle, the aim of which is the systematic completeness of all cognitions. This principle authorizes me, beginning at the genus, to descend to the various and diverse contained under it; and in this way extension, as in the former case unity, is assured to the system.
In both cases, the progress has necessarily been from the simple and concrete to the complex and abstract; and as with the cognitions, so with the feelings, this must be the basis of classification. The space here occupied with criticisms on Mr. Bain's work, we might have filled with exposition and eulogy, had we thought this the more important.
Geometry, nevertheless, advances steadily and securely in the province of pure a priori cognitions, without needing to ask from philosophy any certificate as to the pure and legitimate origin of its fundamental conception of space.
Principles a priori are so called, not merely because they contain in themselves the grounds of other judgements, but also because they themselves are not grounded in higher and more general cognitions. This peculiarity, however, does not raise them altogether above the need of a proof.
Nor, again, the sense-organs in so far as modified by some defect; for they also can only produce modifications in what is effected by them, i.e. cognition. And the hypothesis of a beginningless, false ajnana constituting the general material cause of all erroneous cognitions has been refuted above.
Presentative cognitions; or those in which consciousness is occupied in localizing a sensation impressed on the organism occupied, that is, with the relation between this presented mental state and those other presented mental states which make up our consciousness of the part affected: as when we cut ourselves.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking