[1285] Cf. above, pp. 195-6, 198, 339-42.
[1286] A 243 = B 301.
[1287] A 242 = B 302.
[1288] Cf. A 248 = B 305.
[1289] A 246-7 = B 303-4. A 247-8 = B 304-5 (beginning “Thought is the action,” etc.) is merely a repetition of the preceding argument, and probably represents a later intercalation.
[1290] Beginning “Appearances, so far as ...,” which was omitted in the second edition. It probably constitutes, as Adickes maintains (K. p. 254 n.), the original beginning of this chapter. The “as we have hitherto maintained” of its second paragraph, which obviously cannot apply to the pages which precede it in its present position, must refer to the argument of the Analytic.
[1291] A 249, 251.
[1292] Above, p. 204 ff.
[1293] In large part it represents the Critical position as understood by Schopenhauer, who never succeeded in acquiring any genuine understanding of Kant’s more mature teaching (cf. above, p. 366 n.). Schopenhauer is correct in maintaining that one chief ground of Kant’s belief in the existence of things in themselves lies in his initial assumption that they must be postulated in order to account for the given manifold. Schopenhauer is also justified in stating that Kant, though starting from the dualistic Cartesian standpoint, so far modified it as to conclude that the origin of this manifold must be “objective, since there is no ground for regarding it as subjective” (Parerga und Paralipomena, 1851 ed., p. 74 ff.). But for two reasons this is a very incomplete, and therefore extremely misleading, account of Kant’s final teaching. In the first place, Schopenhauer fails to take account of Kant’s implied distinction between the sensations of the special senses and the manifold of outer sense. When Kant recognises that the sensations of the special senses are empirically conditioned, he is constrained in consistency to distinguish between them and the manifold which constitutes the matter of all experiences (cf. above, p. 275 ff.). Things in themselves, in accounting for the latter, account also, but in quite indirect fashion, for the former. Though sensations are empirically conditioned, the entire natural world is noumenally grounded. Secondly, Kant’s subjectivism undergoes a similar transformation on its inner or mental side. The analysis of self-consciousness, which is given both in the Deductions and in the Paralogisms, indicates with sufficient clearness Kant’s recognition that the form of experience is as little self-explanatory as its content, and that it must not, without such proof as, owing to the limitations of our experience, we are debarred from giving, be regarded as more ultimate in nature. The realities which constitute and condition our mental processes are not apprehended in any more direct manner than the thing in itself. When, therefore, Schopenhauer asserts in the World as Will and Idea (Werke, Frauenstädt, ii. p. 494, Eng. trans, ii. p. 6) that Kant proves the world to be merely phenomenal by demonstrating that it is conditioned by the intellect, he is emphasising what is least characteristic in Kant’s teaching. Schopenhauer’s occasional identification of the intellect with the brain—the nearest approximation in his writings to what may be described as phenomenalism—itself suffices to show how entirely he is lacking in any firm grasp of Critical principles.
[1294] As we have noted (above, p. 204 ff.), the doctrine of the transcendental object was entirely eliminated from those main sections that were rewritten or substantially altered in the second edition, namely, the chapters on the Transcendental Deduction, on Phenomena and Noumena, and on the Paralogisms. That it remained in the section on Amphiboly, in the Second Analogy, and in the Antinomies is sufficiently explained by Kant’s unwillingness to make the very extensive alterations which such further rewriting would have involved.