The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. I, Nos. 1-4, 1867Various
Philosophy
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. I, Nos. 1-4, 1867
Various
Philosophy -- Periodicals
Hence, even Critical Idealism can proceed in a twofold manner. Either it
deduces this system of necessary modes of action, and together with it
the objective representations arising therefrom, really from the
fundamental laws of the Intelligence, and thus causes gradually to arise
under the very eyes of the reader or hearer the whole extent of our
representations; or it gathers these laws—perhaps as they are already
immediately applied to objects; hence, in a lower condition, and then
they are called categories—gathers these laws somewhere, and now
asserts, that the objects are determined and regulated by them.
I ask the critic who follows the last-mentioned method, and who does not
deduce the assumed laws of the Intelligence from the Essence of the
Intelligence, where he gets the material knowledge of these laws, the
knowledge that they are just these very same laws; for instance, that of
Substantiality or Causality? For I do not want to trouble him yet with
the question, how he knows that they are mere immanent laws of the
Intelligence. They are the laws which are immediately applied to
objects, and he can only have obtained them by abstraction from these
objects, i. e. from Experience. It is of no avail if he takes them, by a
roundabout way, from logic, for logic is to him only the result of
abstraction from the objects, and hence he would do indirectly, what
directly might appear too clearly in its true nature. Hence he can prove
by nothing that his postulated Laws of Thinking are really Laws of
Thinking, are really nothing but immanent laws of the Intelligence. The
Dogmatist asserts in opposition, that they are not, but that they are
general qualities of Things, founded on the nature of Things, and there
is no reason why we should place more faith in the unproved assertion of
the one than in the unproved assertion of the other. This course of
proceeding, indeed, furnishes no understanding that and why the
Intelligence should act just in this particular manner. To produce such
an understanding, it would be necessary to premise something which can
only appertain to the Intelligence, and from those premises to deduce
before our eyes the laws of Thinking.
By such a course of proceeding it is above all incomprehensible how the
object itself is obtained; for although you may admit the unproved
postulates of the critic, they explain nothing further than the
_qualities_ and _relations_ of the Thing: (that it is, for instance, in
space, manifested in time, with accidences which must be referred to a
substance, &c.) But whence that which has these relations and qualities?
whence then the substance which is clothed in these forms? This
substance Dogmatism takes refuge in, and you have but increased the
evil.
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