Loyola College - Review Yearbook (Montreal, Quebec Canada)

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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-

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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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NEW CHEMICAL LABORATORY ject in the objective world. For instance when we make the judgment “Fire is the cause of burning we speak of something which we do not know and which we can- not know. We cannot know causality be- cause we have never experienced it and yet we are made in such a way that we. must understand things in the relation of cause and effect. When we say fire causes burning, all we see is first the fire, and afterwards the burning, but we do not know the causality. So with the other eategories of quantity, quality, modality, ete. We cannot see the quantity of a thing, we cannot see its one-ness; and yet we say this thing is one and this other is many. They are merely “а priori forms; we are made in such а way that when we see first the fire and then the burning, we say the fire causes the burning. So when we speak of causality or of other non-empirical concepts, we speak of something which ean never be found in the objective world. Now science does not consist in an un- related collection of judgments, but in а systematic grouping and classification of these judgments. This the reason does. The reason is the third phase of the cog- nitive faculty, an d its particular duty is to systematize these judgments of the intel- lect. It places these judgments іп а few branches; reduces them to a few headings. So there must be some headings in the reason under which to put them. Thus it is that there are forms of the reason, not known by experience, under which every judgment of the intellect ean be placed. These forms are called ideas, and are three in number, the Ego, God, and the universe. . These ideas exist. But are they objective? We do not know. We know that there is à tendency of our reason to group all judgments under these ideas. We are made in such a way that in considering things, the mind takes the ex- istence of God, for instance, for granted. “But,” we might object, “the existence of God is not a mere form, a mere shadowy idea which we cannot substantiate; we have proof positive of the existence of God. Kant takes each argument and tries to refute it, to convince himself at any rate; he shows thus that by the power of our reason we cannot attain to the exis- tence of God. The reason we cannot do this, he says, is simply because we ca nnot have a true and certain knowledge of the noumena. In like manner he shows how everything pertaining to the universe can be reduced to four antinomies, which are propositions in opposition to each other, but each of which can be affirmed with equal truth. Whatever is said in psychol- ogy, the science of the Ego or the soul, is a paralogism, contains a fallacy, the fall- acy of giving objectivity to what is only a tendency on the part of the intellect. Now Kant has shown us that science must consist in synthetic “a prior?” judg- ments; he has shown us how these “a priori' forms of the intellect have no ob- jectivity in the world of things; so he con- m,