Causation; Knowledge, Theory of; Philosophy, German; Reason
What I called applied logic (contrary to the common acceptation of this
term, according to which it should contain certain exercises for the
scholar, for which pure logic gives the rules), is a representation of
the understanding, and of the rules of its necessary employment in
concreto, that is to say, under the accidental conditions of the
subject, which may either hinder or promote this employment, and which
are all given only empirically. Thus applied logic treats of attention,
its impediments and consequences, of the origin of error, of the state
of doubt, hesitation, conviction, etc., and to it is related pure
general logic in the same way that pure morality, which contains only
the necessary moral laws of a free will, is related to practical
ethics, which considers these laws under all the impediments of
feelings, inclinations, and passions to which men are more or less
subjected, and which never can furnish us with a true and demonstrated
science, because it, as well as applied logic, requires empirical and
psychological principles.
II. Of Transcendental Logic.
General logic, as we have seen, makes abstraction of all content of
cognition, that is, of all relation of cognition to its object, and
regards only the logical form in the relation of cognitions to each
other, that is, the form of thought in general. But as we have both
pure and empirical intuitions (as transcendental æsthetic proves), in
like manner a distinction might be drawn between pure and empirical
thought (of objects). In this case, there would exist a kind of logic,
in which we should not make abstraction of all content of cognition;
for or logic which should comprise merely the laws of pure thought (of
an object), would of course exclude all those cognitions which were of
empirical content. This kind of logic would also examine the origin of
our cognitions of objects, so far as that origin cannot be ascribed to
the objects themselves; while, on the contrary, general logic has
nothing to do with the origin of our cognitions, but contemplates our
representations, be they given primitively à priori in ourselves, or be
they only of empirical origin, solely according to the laws which the
understanding observes in employing them in the process of thought, in
relation to each other. Consequently, general logic treats of the form
of the understanding only, which can be applied to representations,
from whatever source they may have arisen.
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