The whole of the chapter on the Amphiboly, which follows this, is merely a
criticism of the Leibnitzian philosophy, and as such is on the whole
correct, though the form or pattern on which it is constructed is chosen
merely for the sake of architectonic symmetry, which here also is the
guiding clue. Thus, to carry out the analogy with the Aristotelian
Organon, a transcendental Topic is set up, which consists in this, that
every conception is to be considered from four points of view, in order to
make out to which faculty of knowledge it belongs. But these four points
of view are quite arbitrarily selected, and ten others might be added to
them with just as much right; but their fourfold number corresponds to the
titles of the categories, and therefore the chief doctrine of Leibnitz is
divided among them as best it may be. By this critique, also, to some
extent, certain errors are stamped as natural to the reason, whereas they
were merely false abstractions of Leibnitz’s, who, rather than learn from
his great philosophical contemporaries, Spinoza and Locke, preferred to
serve up his own strange inventions. In the chapter on the Amphiboly of
Reflection it is finally said that there may possibly be a kind of
perception entirely different from ours, to which, however, our categories
are applicable; therefore the objects of that supposed perception would be
_noumena_, things which can only be _thought_ by us; but since the
perception which would give that thought meaning is wanting to us, and
indeed is altogether quite problematical, the object of that thought would
also merely be a wholly indefinite possibility. I have shown above by
quotations that Kant, in utter contradiction with himself, sets up the
categories now as the condition of knowledge of perception, now as the
function of merely abstract thought. Here they appear exclusively in the
latter sense, and it seems quite as if he wished to attribute them merely
to discursive thought. But if this is really his opinion, then necessarily
at the beginning of the Transcendental Logic, before specifying the
different functions of thought at such length, he was necessarily bound to
characterise thought in general, and consequently to distinguish it from
perception; he ought to have shown what knowledge is given by mere
perception, and what that is new is added by thought. Then we would have
known what he was really speaking about; or rather, he would then have
spoken quite differently, first of perception, and then of thought;
instead of which, as it is, he is always dealing with something between
the two, which is a mere delusion. There would not then be that great gap
between the transcendental Æsthetic and the transcendental Logic, where,
after the exposition of the mere form of perception, he simply dismisses
its content, all that is empirically apprehended, with the phrase “It is
given,” and does not ask how it came about, _whether with or without