Man or Matter by Ernst Lehrs
page 71 of 488 (14%)
page 71 of 488 (14%)
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Among the essays in which Goethe in later years gave out some of the results of his scientific observation in axiomatic form, is one called 'Intuitive Judgment' ('Anschauende Urteilskraft'), in which he maintains that he has achieved in practice what Kant had declared to be for ever beyond the scope of the human mind. Goethe refers to a passage in the Critique of Judgment, where Kant defines the limits of human cognitional powers as he had observed them in his study of the peculiar nature of the human reason. We must first go briefly into Kant's own exposition of the matter.1 Kant distinguishes between two possible forms of reason, the intellectus archetypus and the intellectus ectypus. By the first he means a reason 'which being, not like ours, discursive, but intuitive, proceeds from the synthetic universal (the intuition of the whole as such) to the particular, that is, from the whole to the parts'. According to Kant, such a reason lies outside human possibilities. In contrast to it, the intellectus ectypus peculiar to man is restricted to taking in through the senses the single details of the world as such; with these it can certainly construct pictures of their totalities, but these pictures never have more than a hypothetical character and can claim no reality for themselves. Above all, it is not given to such a thinking to think 'wholes' in such a way that through an act of thought alone the single items contained in them can be conceived as parts springing from them by necessity. (To illustrate this, we may say that, according to Kant, we can certainly comprehend the parts of an organism, say of a plant, and out of its components make a picture of the plant as a whole; but we are not in a position to think that 'whole' of the plant which conditions the existence of its |
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