which concern abstract conceptions solely and alone, and that according to
their relation in the judgment. Substance and accident, on the other hand,
belong to the world of perception and its apprehension in the
understanding, and are even there only as identical with matter and form
or quality. Of this more shortly.
The antithesis which has given occasion for the assumption of two
fundamentally different substances, body and soul, is in truth that of
objective and subjective. If a man apprehends himself objectively in
external perception, he finds a being extended in space and in general
merely corporeal; but if, on the other hand, he apprehends himself in mere
self-consciousness, thus purely subjectively, he finds himself a merely
willing and perceiving being, free from all forms of perception, thus also
without a single one of the properties which belong to bodies. Now he
forms the conception of the soul, like all the transcendental conceptions
called by Kant Ideas, by applying the principle of sufficient reason, the
form of all objects, to that which is not an object, and in this case
indeed to the subject of knowing and willing. He treats, in fact, knowing,
thinking, and willing as effects of which he seeks the cause, and as he
cannot accept the body as their cause, he assumes a cause of them entirely
different from the body. In this manner the first and the last of the
dogmatists proves the existence of the soul: Plato in the “Phædrus” and
also Wolf: from thinking and willing as the effects which lead to that
cause. Only after in this way, by hypostatising a cause corresponding to
the effect, the conception of an immaterial, simple, indestructible being
had arisen, the school developed and demonstrated this from the conception
of _substance_. But this conception itself they had previously constructed
specially for this purpose by the following artifice, which is worthy of
notice.