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CHAPTER XIII.

RECAPITULATION, WITH ADDITIONAL SUGGESTIONS.

THE last Chapter completes our analysis of the Intellectual powers. This analysis has led to the following classification of the powers, or functions of the Intelligence, distinguished as primary and secondary:

Intellectual Faculties enumerated.

The former include Consciousness, the faculty which gives us a knowledge of whatever passes in the interior of our own minds, or subjective phenomena-Sense, the faculty which gives the qualities of external, material substances, or objective phenomena-and Reason, the faculty which apprehends and affirms the reality of necessary, universal, spiritual, infinite, and eternal truths.

The secondary faculties comprehend the Understanding, the conceptive or notion-forming power-the Judgment, the classifying, generalizing, and realizing power-the associating principle, with its varied functions, as simple association or suggestion, Memory, Recollection, and Fancy-and the Imagination, or esemplastic power.

All these faculties we have found distinctly marked, and separated, the one from the other, by fundamental phenomInto these, we have found, that all the phenomena of human Intelligence may be resolved. These, then, we conclude to be the faculties of the human Intelligence.

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Feeling a deep solicitude that the grounds of the above distinctions may be understood and appreciated, I have determined upon a cursory review of the various topics discussed in the preceding analysis. For particular reasons, I shall base this recapitulation upon the principle of classification of mental phenomena adopted by Kant in his Critick of

Pure Reason-a principle, as we have seen, leading to the same classification of the intellectual powers, and to the advanced student, on some accounts, preferable to the one adopted in the preceding analysis.

"That all our cognition," he says, "begins with experience, there is not any doubt; for how otherwise should the faculty of cognition be awakened into exercise, if this did not occur through objects which affect our senses, and partly of themselves produce representations, and partly bring our Understanding-capacity into action, to compare these, to connect, or to separate them, and in this way to work up the rude matter of sensible impressions into a cognition of objects, which is termed experience? In respect of time, therefore, no cognition can precede in us experience, and with this all commences.

"But although all our cognition begins with experience, still on that account, all does not precisely spring up out of experience. For it may easily happen that even our empirical cognition may be a compound of that which we have received through our impressions, and of that which our proper Cognition-faculty (merely called into action by sensible impressions) supplies from itself, which addition we cannot distinguish from the former original matter, until long exercise has made us attentive to it, and skilful in the separation thereof."

All cognitions, or intellectual phenomena, are therefore divided by Kant into two classes-those derived from experience, and those not thus derived. The former he demonstrates empirical, the latter a priori cognitions. Cognitions a priori all have these fundamental characteristics, and by these they are distinguished from the empirical of every kind, to wit, universality and necessity. The proposition, for example, An event supposes a cause, is not only true of every event of which we have had experience, but we know absolutely that it must be true of all events actual and conceivable. These characteristics can never pertain to phenomena which have their source in experience, which is always limited, and in no instance can affirm anything more than that a thing really is, without ever affirming that it must be.

Influence of the above Distinctions.

The student who has followed this philosopher thus far,

and has understood the ground of his classification, will never after, whatever his philosophic destiny may be, range himself as a disciple of Locke, maintaining and believing that all our knowledge comes from experience. He may fall into vagaries incomparably more wild and extravagant than ever appeared among the disciples of the sensual school. Yet between him and Empiricism "there is a great gulf fixed," and he will never pass over it to the school from which he has been separated. His destiny lies in another direction. Having discovered in the depths of his Intelligence, cognitions bearing the characteristics of absolute universality and necessity, he never will, and never can, adopt the principle, that all our knowledge comes from sensation

and reflection.

Errors of Kant.

While we admit the reality and validity of cognitions a priori, as distinct from the empirical, it becomes a matter of fundamental importance in philosophy to settle definitely the relations between these two classes of phenomena thus distinguished. This point has been settled in the preceding analysis. Cognitions a priori universally sustain this relation to the empirical, that of logical antecedents, while the former are the chronological antecedents of the latter. Now these relations Kant overlooks entirely. Here lies his first error. On the other hand, he assumes, without argument or any attempt at proof, that there are cognitions a priori-cognitions more important than all others-which not only do not spring out of experience, but which transcend all experience, and extend the compass of our judgments wholly beyond its limits. "And exactly," he adds, "in these last cognitions, which transcend the sensible world, where experience. can afford neither guide nor correction, lie the investigations of Reason, which we, as far as regards their importance, hold to be highly preferable, and in their object, far more elevated, than all the Understanding can teach in the field of phenomena, even with the danger of erring, rather than that we should give up such important investigations from any ground of doubtfulness, or disregard, or indifference. These unavoidable problems of pure Reason itself, are God, Liberty, and Immortality." The principle announced in this passage is this, That the cognition-faculty, once roused into action by experience, evolves through its own laws, and wholly irre

spective and independent of what is given in experience, the conceptions above named-conceptions which sustain the relation of logical antecedents to no empirical cognitions whatever, and that the chief investigations of Reason pertain to these conceptions. Here lies the great error of this philosopher. From this single assumption flow out the most important peculiarities of his philosophy, together with all the wild vagaries of Transcendentalism. If these ideas are in the mind as logical antecedents of no empirical intuitions whatever, they are there as splendid conceptions to be sure, but with no claims whatever to objective validity—with no evidence that any corresponding realities exist. Yet as laws of thought, they determine our Understanding-conceptions pertaining to ourselves, the external universe, and the origin of each. Such notions, therefore, as far as they depend upon and receive their character from these ideas, have no claim to objective validity. They are realities to us, simply and exclusively because our Intelligence, by virtue of its own inherent laws, has made them, relatively to ourselves, what they appear to be. Further, if these ideas of Reason exist in the Mind thus independent of experience, and at the same time exist there as regulative principles of experience-conceptions, should we not suppose, and does it not follow as a logical consequent, that all other a priori ideas have the same characteristics, and sustain the same relation to experience— such ideas, for example, as those of time, space, cause, and substance?

These last ideas have the same characteristics of universality and necessity as those of God, Liberty, and Immortality; and, as laws of thought, sustain precisely the same relations to all Understanding-conceptions. All a priori ideas, therefore, exist in the Intelligence without any claim to objective validity. As those ideas, also, as laws of thought, determine the character of all Understanding-conceptions, these last are alike destitute of any claim to objective validity. Neither ourselves, nor the external world, nor that which our Intelligence gives us, as the cause of each, are what we take them to be." They are all mere fictions of our Intelligence. Such Kant himself denominates them. Since this philosopher passed off the stage, his successors, such as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, have been laboring to build up the fabric of human knowledge upon the assumption above named, all agreeing in laying the foundation of their

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glorious temple upon "airy nothing," upon the wise assumption, that the very temple they were building with so much toil and trouble was not "what they took it to be." Such, however, is the logical consequence of the assumption on which all their conclusions rest.

On the other hand, if we conceive the entire action of Reason to be in fixed correlation, in the first instance, to the intuitions of Sense and Consciousness, and in the second to Understanding-conceptions, giving the logical antecedents of such intuitions and conceptions, if we suppose that such intuitions and conceptions, in the order of actual development, precede the ideas to which they are respectively correlated, and are consequently unmodified by them, then we have an entirely different system of knowledge. On this topic I shall have occasion to speak again hereafter.

Classification of Mental Faculties.

While the great principle which peculiarizes the system of Kant, and determines its destiny, is found to be a baseless assumption, his classification of the Intellectual faculties clearly designate him as one of the greatest analyzers of the human mind that has yet appeared. We will now proceed to a consideration of this subject. Knowledge, with us, commences not with judgments, but intuitions. This is evident from the fact that all judgments are composed of intuitions. Intuitions are of two classes, empirical, and a priori. The former also are subdivided as subjective and objective. This classification of intuitions gives us a threefold division of the primary faculties, or functions of the Intelligence, to wit, Sense, which gives us the qualities of external material substances-Consciousness, which gives us the qualities of the mind, or subjective phenomena--and Reason, which gives us intuitions a priori. This classification is sustained by phenomena fundamentally distinct from one another.

REMARKS UPON THE RELATIONS OF INTUITIONS TO ONE ANOTHER.

Before leaving the present subject it may be important to make a few remarks upon the relations of intuitions to one another, together with that of the faculties of intuition.

Intuitions cannot be opposed to each other.

My first remark is, that intuitions can never be in con

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