Loyola College - Review Yearbook (Montreal, Quebec Canada)

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18 LOYOLA COLLEGE REVIEW Transcendental in the Scholastic chain of thought (the most logical, convincing and coherent the world has known), were forged by Aristotle, through the era of St. Augustine and St. Thomas even to the present day, myriads of radical doc- trines and dissenting systems have sprung up; and, as the sun rises pallid against a blue sky, blazes forth triumphantly at noon and then sinks, so they have waged their little wars against Scholasticism, have celebrated their ephemeral triumphs and then faded into obscurity, the deadly oblivion that is the world’s last mocking gift to its fallen idols. Of these dissenting systems by far the greatest was the idealism of Immanuel Kant. Subtle and yet coherent in thought, clear and yet forceful in expression, and, what is of far greater import, a real, con- sistent system, not a mere collection of ob- jections nor a study of a single phase of philosophy, the work of Kant towers above that of the others like a giant above pig- mies. His tenets were hidden behind a veil of seeming truths; his doctrines are plausible and appealing, and, after Kant, spread to Hegel, Fichte and Schelling, who E ROM the time when the first links Idealism of Kant helped to cherish and nurture this menace to science. A menace it is and a danger- ous one, too, for if we admitted its princi- ples cosmology, theology, metaphysics and rational psychology would lose all value to us as sciences. When Kant first began to think on this question it was with the view of refuting scepticism, and. so, naturally enough, three questions rose uppermost in his mind. Сап we know? Сап we know truly and certainly? Апа if so, what do we know truly and certainly? He imme- diately saw that the surest and most prac- tical way to find the answer to these ques- tions was to make a criticism, an analysis of the cognitive faculty. То find out how we know and what we know, the only thing to do is to examine the instrument by which we know. бо when he asks “Сап we know, Kant answers yes, we can know but we know only the phenomena, that is, these things which can be known to us by sensuous intuition; but we can never know the nowmena, or those things over which sensuous knowledge cannot extend its domain. By noumena he un- derstands the things as they are in them- selves; what we know is those things, not

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LOYOLA COLLEGE REVIEW 1? bery and of all his past career,—only to them he said his name was Oliver Lynd. And within half an hour extras were is- sued with the glaring head-lines: — “Amazing Coup! A Fall Into $15,000! Theft Aboard Elmeric! Reward $2,000.” Below was told how “Oliver Lynd, of the D’Aubigny Stock Co., (which opens at the Majestic to-night for a three weeks run) was robbed of $15,000 while coming from Dundas to Trenton by a fellow who gave the name of Brown, though it is practically certain this is not his name. Further- more, Mr. Lynd is confined to his room, suffering from a nervous shock, and his doctors consider it altogether unlikely that he will be able to appear on the first night; but his clever under-study is fully capable of giving a finished personifica- tion ot ‘Traddles.’ After a good supper that night, Jerry sent a young brother out to buy a paper. No-one had been at home when he arrived; and he had changed his clothes, and care- fully hidden the wallet in a hole he had prepared with great skill in the wall, be- hind a cheap print of Man-o’-War.—So R. Ryan С. d'Ivry Е. Amos W. Dowling now he sits and builds his castles in the air. He will buy two horses of the Wel- lington stables, and set up as an owner of race-horses. Не will... Just then his brother came back with the paper and its heavy-typed news. When he had read the paper, and saw related of a Mr. Lynd, young and alert, what he knew was true only of an aged and clumsy Mr. Fullerton, he began to fear. Going to his room, he drew the blinds, lit the gas and then in mingled hope and fear opened the wallet. Then he knew why he had never felt quite at his ease with the glib-speaking old fel- low; why he had been always rather sus- picious as to the extent of “Fullerton’s” gullibility. Then—as he held the bills in his hands—he could easily imagine Lynd sitting in his room at the hotel, hugging himself in delight at his easily-won notor- iety, his inexpensive advertising scheme. For the hundred-dollar bills in Jerry’s hands were stage-money.—Then he turned out the light and crept back to his hard bed. Oh, what had he done to fickle Dame Fortune? ; FRANS VILLELA, 724. Maurice Versailles Tom Toddings Roddie Lemieux Adair Price Cecil Carpenter OLD LOYOLA SNOW-SHOEING ON MOUNT ROYAL, WITH FATHER QUIRK Spring Spring! the sweet time of joy and bliss,— Flowers spring up the dew to kiss. Warm winds blow and grass sprouts green,— Buttercups glisten with silver sheen. The crow is Herald, the robin the Pet,— Nests have lodgers that long were to let; The sun grows warm, the winds are soft,— And doves are cooing up in the loft. т Sir Robin soon for worms will seek Where violets from the green grass peek; All the world will laugh and shout And lambkins leap in joyous rout. School boys tire, are drowsy and dull,— Trickling streams to sleep would lull; Themes are a burden, oft.go undone For а 9 and baseball give much more un. Oh, why to class should we mortals plod While around us frolic the friends of God. So, stay in your class-room, heartless churl! Ill to the meadows where brooklets purl. PAUL CASEY, 724,

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LOYOLA COLLEGE REVIEW 19 as they are in themselves, but as they appear to: us. Pursuing this question along logical lines, the question comes “How is it that we know only the phenomenon and cannot know the noumenon? Тһе solution read- ily appears when we make a survey of the cognitive faculty. Тһе cognitive faculty is three-fold, namely, sensibility, intellect and reason. With the sensual perception we see material objects; but true science ean never consist of judgments of the sen- sibility. The two are radically opposed. They are as different as day and night, as opposed ав spirituality is to what is material and corporeal. Science is necessary апа universal, whereas empirical knowledge is con- tingent and particular. Only judgments that are necessary and universal can find a place in science, because science con- cerns itself, not with the fact that such a thing happened, but asks why it hap- pened; it deals with the laws that govern phenomena, not with instances or partic- ular happenings. Now empirical knowl- edge is not necessary but contingent, since experience tells us what is, but not that it must necessarily be so and not otherwise; it is not universal but particular, because what we perceive is not house nor horse, but such a house, such a horse. When we visit a big city we do not visit city in gen- eral, but we visit this particular city. So, Science can never be found in the percep- tion of the sensibility. Kant now shows us that we do not per- ceive the phenomena wholly as they really are. We partly do, in as far as something of what we know exists in the world of reality; and we partly do not, in as far as not all of what we know of them exists in reality. What the sensibility adds is space and time; two forms which the sen- sibility imposes on whatever enters it. Space and time do not really exist, but nevertheless, every sensuous intuition is stamped as it were with these “a priori forms, space and time. When the mind sees an object it sees it not as it is but sees it in space. And when man has a subjec- tive modification, when, for instance, he feels that he is sleepy, he has that modifi- cation in time. Не feels he is not only Sleepy, but sleepy now, and not in ten minutes. Now there are no such things in the objective world as space and time; because if there were, we would have seen them, felt them or at least noticed them at some time or other. But we cannot see time nor space. When we see an object, we cannot see the space. And yet we af- firm that the object exists in space. Why do we do this? Why do we say there is such a thing as space, when we cannot know it? It is because that is the way we are made. Space and time are forms of our sensibility; our minds are во constituted that they cannot see things except in space and time. Therefore, sen- sual perceptions include two elements, matter and form. The matter is the phen- omenon, the form the way in which it is perceived. Science, we have seen, does not consist in perceptions of the sensibility. It remains then to see whether it can be found in judgments of the intellect. Kant answers that it can, but not in all judgments of the intellect. Let us first explain that a judg- ment is nothing more than the affirming of the identity or non-identity of two ob- jective concepts. Now judgments may be either analytic or synthetic. An analytic judgment is one in which the predicate is already found in the subject, e. g., when I say “А circle is round, the very idea of circle tells me it must be round. I do not add to the idea of circle something which I did not know of it before. It follows then that this kind is a judgment in name only and does not contribute to science, because I do not compare two concepts. I really know one and the same thing. A synthetic judgment on the other hand is one in which the predicate is not found in the subject, e. g., The earth attracts bodies to it by the force of gravitation. А syn- thetic judgment may be a posteriori or “а priori. It is “a posteriori when it is taken from experience, and it has already been seen that judgments taken from ex- perience are not valid, considered scien- tifically, because they lack two elements requisite to scientific knowledge, namely necessity and strict universality. Ап “а priori judgment is one that is not taken from experience. Only the synthetic “а priori' judgment then has scientific value. Now we have just said that the relation existing between the subject and the pre- dicate іп an “а priori judgment cannot come from experience. Where then does it come from? It comes from the pure understanding, the intellect, which places every judgment in a sort of pigeon-hole of the mind called categories. These cate- gories are twelve in number, corresponding to the twelve forms of judgment the mind may make and, in nature, are strictly “а priori. They have no corresponding ob-