In the Transcendental Logic there is also a reputation of idealism. There Kant establishes this theorem:
"The mere consciousness of my own existence, empirically determined, proves the existence of objects outside of me in space."
It is not possible for me to give here the doctrines of Kant's Transcendental Logic; it is enough to have given his remarks on the reality of objects; others call them retractations or contradictions, and give various causes for them, which, however, do not belong to the field of philosophy.
ON CHAPTER XIX.
(32) The scholastics always carefully separated the sensible order from the intelligible. Kant was not the first to discover the limits which divide the intelligible from the sensible, things in themselves as objects of the understanding, noumena, as he calls them, from things as represented in sensible intuition, phenomena. The scholastics were so far from regarding sensible representations as sufficient for intelligence, that they denied that they were intelligible. The intellect might know sensible things, but it was necessary for it to abstract them from material conditions. On account of its limitation, it required the intuition of objects in sensible representation, conversio ad phantasmata; but these intuitions were not the intellectual act, they were only its necessary conditions. Hence proceeded the theory of the intellectus agens, which some have laughed at, because they did not understand it. This hypothesis has strong reasons in its favor, whatever may be its intrinsic value, if, setting aside the form in which it is expressed, we attend only to its ideological profoundness.
In reading some passages in Kant's Transcendental Logic on phenomena and noumena, on the necessity of sensible intuition in pure conceptions, and the distinction of the intuition from the conception, and on the sensible and intelligible worlds corresponding to the sensitive and intellective faculties, we might suppose that the German philosopher had read the scholastics. True, he departed from their doctrines, but what of that? The authors from whom we learn the most, are not always those whose opinions we follow.
In the treatise on ideas, I shall have occasion to explain my opinion on this point; for the present I shall only make a few extracts from St. Thomas, the most illustrious representative of the scholastic philosophy. The reader will find that he clearly explains our necessity of sensible representations, (phantasmata,) and the line which divides these representations from the purely intellectual order.
"(Pars 1, Q. LXXIX., art. 3.) Sed quia Aristoteles non posuit formas rerum naturalium subsistere sine materia, formæ autem in materia existentes non sunt intelligibiles actu; sequebatur, quod naturæ, seu formæ rerum sensibilium, quas intelligimus, non essent intelligibiles actu. Nihil autem reducitur de potentia in actum, nisi per aliquod ens actu: sicut sensus fit in actu per sensibile in actu. Oportet igitur ponere aliquam virtutem ex parte intellectus, quæ faceret intelligibilia in actu per abstractionem specierum a conditionibus materialibus. Et hæc est necessitas ponendi intellectum agentem.
"(P. 1, Q. LXXIX., art. 4). Ad cujus evidentiam considerandum est, quod supra animam intellectivam humanam, necesse est ponere aliquem superiorem intellectum, a quo anima virtutem intelligendi obtineat.
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