3. Of Relation, as substance and accident, cause and effect; or,

4. Of Modality, as possibility and impossibility, existence and non-existence, necessity and contingency.

‘The judgment is the capacity of applying the general ideas of the understanding to the information of experience. The objects of experience are regulated according to these ideas; and not, vice versâ, our ideas according to the objects.’

Such is the outline of this author’s account of the intellect, which, after all, appears to be rather dogmatical than demonstrative. He is much more intent on raising an extensive and magnificent fabric, than on laying the foundations. Each part does not rest upon its own separate basis, but, like the workmanship of some lofty arch, is supported and rivetted to its place by the weight and regular balance of the whole. Kant does not appear to trouble himself about the evidence of any particular proposition, but to rely on the conformity and mutual correspondence of the different parts of his general system, and its sufficiency, if admitted, to explain all the phenomena of the human intellect with consistency and accuracy;—in the same manner as the decypherer infers that he has found the true key of the hieroglyphic hand-writing, when he is able to solve every difficulty by it. However profound and comprehensive we may allow the views of human nature unfolded by this philosopher to be, his method is necessarily defective in simplicity, clearness, and force. His reasoning is seldom any thing more than a detailed, paraphrased explanation of his original statement, instead of being (what it ought to be) an appeal to known facts, or a deduction from acknowledged principles, or a detection of the inconsistencies of other writers. The extreme involution and technicality of his style proceed from the same source; that is, from the necessity of adapting a conventional language to the artificial and arbitrary arrangement of his ideas. The whole of Kant’s system is evidently an elaborate antithesis or contradiction to the modern philosophy, and yet it is by no means a real approximation to popular opinion. Its chief object is to oppose certain fundamental principles to the empirical or mechanical philosophy, and it either rejects or explains away the more common and established notions, except so far as they coincide with the rigid theory of the author. He sets out with a preconceived hypothesis; and all other facts and opinions are made to bend to a predominant purpose.

The founder of the transcendental philosophy very properly insists on the distinction between the sensitive and the intellectual faculties, and makes this division the ground-work of his entire system. He considers the joint operation of these different powers as necessary to all our knowledge, and enumerates with scrupulous formality the different ideas which originate in this complex progress, and points out the share which each has in each. The author conceives of certain general ideas, as substance and accident, cause and effect, totality, number, quantity, relation, possibility, necessity, etc. as pure ideas of the understanding; and he classes space and time as primary forms of the sensitive faculty.[[9]] All this may be very true; but the proof may also be required, and it is not given. Yet modern metaphysicians are not likely, either as sceptical inquirers after truth, or as lovers of abstruse paradoxes, to be satisfied with the bare assumption of a common prejudice. They will say, either that all these ideas have no real existence in the mind, that they are mere abstract terms which owe their force and validity to the mechanism of language; or admitting their existence in the mind, they will contend with Locke, that they are only general, reflex, and compound ideas, originally derived from sensation. ‘Whence do all the ideas and operations of the mind proceed?’ From experience, is the answer given by the modern philosophy—From experience and from the understanding, is the answer given by Kant. The former solution has the advantage of simplicity; and the logical proof is wanting to the latter. To compare grave things with gay, the display which this celebrated philosopher makes of his categories, his forms of the sensitive faculty, his pure ideas, and à priori principles, somewhat resembles the method taken by Sir Epicure Mammon in The Alchymist to persuade his sceptical friend that he is about to discover the philosopher’s stone by overpowering his imagination with the description of the fine things he will do when he has it:—‘And all this I will do with the stone.’ ‘But will all this give you the stone?’ says Pertinax Surly, who ‘will not believe antiquity’ any more than our modern sceptics.

I think that the truth may be got at much more simply, and without all this parade of words. The business of the mind is twofold—to receive impressions and to perceive their relations; without which there can be no ideas. Now the first of these is the office of the senses, and is the only original function of the mind, according to the prevailing system. The second is properly the office of the understanding, and is that, the nature or existence of which is the great point in debate between the contending parties. The more complex and refined operations of this faculty, such as judging, reasoning, abstraction, willing, etc. are either totally denied, or at best resolved into simple ideas of sensation by modern metaphysical writers. I know of no better way, therefore, to establish the contrary hypothesis than to take these simple ideas of the moderns, and shew that they contain the same necessary principles of the understanding, the same operations of judging, comparing, distinguishing, abstracting, which they discard with so much profound contempt, or treat as accidental and artificial results of some higher faculty. If it can be proved that the understanding, in the strict and exclusive sense, is necessary to our having any ideas whatever,—that the very terms are synonymous and inseparable—that in the first original conception of the simplest object of nature there is implied the same principle, a power of perceiving the relations of different things, which is only exerted in a more perfect and comprehensive manner in the most complex and difficult processes of the human intellect, one would think that there must be an end of the question.

An English Metaphysician.

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED

The Morning Chronicle.][March 3, 1814.

‘For men to have recourse to subtleties in raising difficulties, and then to complain that they should be taken off by minutely examining these subtleties, is a strange kind of proceeding.’