Pragmatism by D. L. Murray
page 13 of 58 (22%)
page 13 of 58 (22%)
|
combine her shattered fragments again into a working unity he declined
to say. He saw the sceptical implications of his analysis, but professed himself unable to suggest a remedy. He had, however, made the embarrassments of the theory of knowledge sufficiently clear for Kant, his most important successor, to hit upon the most obvious palliative, and in the _Critique of Pure Reason_ Kant set himself to patch up Hume's analysis. Experience as it came through the channels of sense, he admitted Hume had analysed correctly; it was 'a manifold,' a whirl of separate sensations. But these _per se_ could not yield knowledge. They must be made to cohere, and the way to do this he had found. The mind on to which they fell was equipped with a complicated apparatus of faculties which could organize the chaotic manifold of sense and turn it into the connected world which common sense and science recognize. First it views the data of sense in the light of its own 'pure intuitions,' and, lo! they are seen to be in Space and Time; then it solidifies them with its own 'categories,' which turn them into 'substances' and 'causes' and endow them with all the attributes required to sustain that status; finally it refers them all to a Transcendental Ego, which is not, indeed, a soul, but sufficiently like one to provide something that can admire the creative synthesis of 'mind as such.' Had Hume lived to read Kant's _Critique_, he would probably have jeered at the vain complications of Kant's transcendental machinery, and made it clear that between the primary manifold of sensation and the first constructions of the intellect there still yawns a gulf which Kant's laboured explanations nowhere bridge. Why does the chaotic 'matter' of sensations submit itself so tamely to |
|