United States or Kazakhstan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


For the categories as Schelling had already objected express necessary forms or general laws only, to which all reality must conform, but which are never capable of generating reality; the content which appears in them and which obeys them, can only be created by a Deity, and only empirically cognized. The following hold similar views, influenced, like Weisse and K. Ph.

By this "I," or "He," or "It," who or which thinks, nothing more is represented than a transcendental subject of thought = x, which is cognized only by means of the thoughts that are its predicates, and of which, apart from these, we cannot form the least conception. Hence in a perpetual circle, inasmuch as we must always employ it, in order to frame any judgement respecting it.

We cannot prove that this practical rule is an imperative, i.e., that the will of every rational being is necessarily bound to it as a condition, by a mere analysis of the conceptions which occur in it, since it is a synthetical proposition; we must advance beyond the cognition of the objects to a critical examination of the subject, that is, of the pure practical reason, for this synthetic proposition which commands apodeictically must be capable of being cognized wholly a priori.

But how is the unextended soul capable of cognizing extended body? Only through the medium of ideas. The ideas occupy an intermediate position between objects, whose archetypes they are, and representations in the soul, whose causes they are. Things are in God in archetypal form, and are cognized through these their archetypes in God.

Now in order that this relation may be cognized as determined, the relation between the two states must be so cogitated that it is thereby determined as necessary, which of them must be placed before and which after, and not conversely.

Again, this intelligible character of a thing cannot be immediately cognized, because we can perceive nothing but phenomena, but it must be capable of being cogitated in harmony with the empirical character; for we always find ourselves compelled to place, in thought, a transcendental object at the basis of phenomena although we can never know what this object is in itself.

Nay, more, this ideal is the only proper ideal of which the human mind is capable; because in this case alone a general conception of a thing is completely determined by and through itself, and cognized as the representation of an individuum.

Such fictitious conceptions derive their character of possibility not, like the categories, a priori, as conceptions on which all experience depends, but only, a posteriori, as conceptions given by means of experience itself, and their possibility must either be cognized a posteriori and empirically, or it cannot be cognized at all.

But the only existence cognized, under the condition of other given phenomena, as necessary, is the existence of effects from given causes in conformity with the laws of causality. Hence it follows that the criterion of necessity is to be found only in the law of possible experience that everything which happens is determined a priori in the phenomenon by its cause.

But this unity is nothing more than the unity in thought, by which no object is given; to which therefore the category of substance which always presupposes a given intuition- cannot be applied. Consequently, the subject cannot be cognized.