Читать книгу Fundamental Philosophy, Vol. 2 (of 2) - Balmes Jaime Luciano - Страница 9

55. Now that we have shown the points of similarity between Kant's system and that of the scholastics, we propose to note their differences chiefly in what concerns the application of these doctrines. To give an idea of the gravity and transcendentalism of these differences, we have only to remark the discrepancy of their results. The Aristotelians built upon their principles a whole system of metaphysical science, which they considered the noblest of sciences, and which, like a rich and brilliant light, fecundates and directs all others; whereas Kant, starting with the same facts, destroys metaphysical science by taking from it all power to know objects in themselves.

56. We here find Kant in opposition not only to the scholastics, properly so called, but also to all the most eminent metaphysicians who had preceded him. On the side of the scholastics in this matter may be cited Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Saint Anselm, Saint Thomas, Descartes, Malebranche, Fenelon, and Leibnitz.

57. No one can deny the transcendency of these questions, if he be not totally ignorant how vital it is to the human mind to know if a science superior to the purely sensible order be possible, whereby man may extend his activity beyond the phenomena offered by matter. These questions are exceedingly profound, and must not be lightly treated. The difficulty and the great abstruseness of the objects treated, the importance, the transcendency of the consequences to which they lead, according to the road followed, demand that no labor whatever should be spared to penetrate these matters. It is easy to assure one's self that upon these questions depends the conservation of sound ideas of God and of the human mind; man's most important and lofty considerations.

To give this matter a thorough examination, let us go back to the origin of the divergence of these philosophical opinions, and let us investigate the reason why, starting with the same facts, they arrive at contradictory results. This requires a clear exposition of the opposite doctrines.

58. All philosophers agree in admitting the fact of sensibility; concerning it there can be no doubt; it is a phenomenon attested by consciousness in so palpable a manner, that not even skeptics could ever deny the subjective reality of the appearance, however much they called in question its objective reality. Idealists, when they deny the existence of bodies, do not deny their phenomenal appearance, their appearance to the mental eye under a sensible form. Sensibility then, and the phenomena it exhibits, have in all ages been primary data in ideological and psychological problems; there may be a discrepancy with respect to the nature and consequences of these data, but there can be none as to their existence.

59. The history of ideological science shows us two schools; one of which admits nothing but sensation, and explains all the affections and operations of the mind by the transformation of the senses; while the other admits primitive facts distinct from sensation; other faculties than that of feeling, and recognizes in the mind a line dividing the sensible from the intellectual order.

60. This latter school is divided into two others; one of which regards the sensible order as not only distinct, but also separate from the intellectual order, and in some sense at war with it; and it therefore maintains that the intellectual can receive nothing from the sensible order, except malign exhortations which either mislead it, or enervate its activity. Hence the system of innate ideas in all its purity; hence the metaphysics of an intellectual order entirely exempt from sensible impressions, metaphysics which, cultivated by eminent geniuses, has in modern times been professed by the author of the Investigation of Truth, with sublime exaggeration. The other ramification of the school also admits the pure intellectual order, but does not hold it to be contaminated by being brought into communication with sensible phenomena; on the contrary, it is rather inclined to believe that the problems of human intelligence, such as it exists in this life, cannot be resolved without fixing the mind upon the aforesaid communication.

61. Experience teaches that this communication exists, conformably to a law of the human mind, and that to contend against the law is to struggle against a truth attested by consciousness: to attempt to destroy it would be a rash undertaking, a kind of mental suicide. For this reason, the school of which we have just spoken, accepts the facts, such as internal experience presents them, and endeavors to explain them by indicating the points where the sensible and intellectual orders may come into communication without being destroyed or confounded.

62. The school that admits the existence of the two orders, the sensible and the intellectual, and at the same time admits the possibility and the reality of their reciprocal communication and influence, has, for its fundamental principle, that the origin of all cognition is in the senses, these being the exciting causes of intellectual activity, and a kind of laborers who supply it with materials, which it then combines in the manner necessary to raise the scientifical structure.

63. Thus far, Kant and the scholastics agree; but here they separate at a point of the greatest importance, and the result is that they pass on to conflicting consequences. The scholastics believed that there were in the understanding true ideas having true objects, and that they might discuss them, independently of the sensible order, with perfect security. They even admitted the principle that there can be nothing in the understanding which was not previously in the senses; but pretended, nevertheless, that there really was something in the understanding, which might conduce to the knowledge of the truth of immaterial, as well as of material things in themselves. The ideas of the purely intellectual order originate in the senses as movers of the intellectual activity; but this activity, by means of abstraction and other operations, forms to itself ideas of its own, by whose aid it may go beyond the sensible order in its search for truth.

64. In their explanation of the purely intellectual order, metaphysicians, both scholastics and anti-scholastics agree, so far as there is question of giving a real objective value to ideas, and of making them a sure means of discovering truth independently of sensible phenomena. However much these schools disagree as to the origin of ideas, they agree in all that relates to their reality and value.

65. Kant, at the same time that he admits the principle of the scholastics, that all our cognitions come from the senses, and recognizes with them the necessity of acknowledging a purely intellectual order, a series of conceptions different from sensible intuition, maintains that these conceptions are not pure cognitions, but empty forms, which of themselves mean nothing, teach the mind nothing, and cannot, in the least, aid us to know the reality of things. These conceptions mean nothing unless filled, so to speak, with sensible intuitions. If these intuitions are wanting, they correspond to nothing, and can be of none but a purely logical use; that is to say, the understanding will think upon and combine them, without, indeed, falling into contradiction, but also without ever coming to any conclusion.

"That the understanding," Kant says, "can never make a transcendental, but only an empirical use, either of its a priori principles, or of its conceptions, is a principle which, if known with conviction, leads to the most important consequences. The transcendental use of a conception in any principle, consists in referring it to things, in general, and in themselves; whilst the empirical use is in referring the conception to phenomena alone, that is, to the objects of a possible experience, by which we may easily see that this latter use is the only one that can stand. To every conception is necessary, first of all, a logical form of a conception in general, of the thought: and secondly, the possibility of subjecting to it an object, to which it may refer; but without this object it wants all sense, it contains nothing, although it may involve the logical function necessary to form a conception by means of certain data. The object cannot be given to a conception except in intuition; and although pure intuition may be a priori possible before the object, it cannot, however, receive its object, and consequently its objective value, otherwise than by the empirical intuition of which it is the form. All conceptions and with them all principles, although they be possible a priori, do, notwithstanding, refer to empirical intuitions, that is, to data of possible experience. Without this they have no objective value; they are nothing but a mere play, whether of the imagination or of the understanding, with the respective representations of the one or the other faculty.

"That the same is the case with all the categories and principles formed from them, is apparent from this, that we cannot really define a single one of them; that is to say, we cannot render the possibility of their object intelligible without attending to the conditions of sensibility, and consequently to the form of the appearances; conditions to which these categories must be confined as to their sole objects. If this condition be taken away, all meaning, that is, all relation to the object is destroyed, and by no example can we be made to conceive what is the proper meaning of these conceptions.

"If no account be made of all the conditions of sensibility which denote them (he is speaking of the categories) as conceptions of a possible empirical use, if they be taken to be conceptions of things in general, and consequently, of transcendental use, nothing remains to be done, so far as they are concerned, but to preserve the logical functions in judgments, as the condition of the possibility of the things themselves, without being able to show in what case, their application and their object, and consequently they themselves, may, in the pure understanding, and without the intervention of sensibility, have a meaning and an objective value.

"It incontestably follows from what has been said, that pure conceptions of the understanding can never have a transcendental use, but only an empirical use; and that the principles of the pure understanding do not refer to the objects of the senses, except when the senses are in relation with the general conditions of a possible experience; but never to things in general, without relation to the way in which we may perceive them."8

66. Thus Kant destroys all metaphysical science, and, involved in its deplorable ruins, perish the most fundamental, most precious, and most sacred ideas of the human mind. According to him, transcendental analysis makes us see that the understanding can never pass the limits of sensibility, the only limits within which objects are given to us in intuition. These principles which were regarded as eternal pillars of the scientific edifice sink into empty forms, into words without meaning, so soon as they rise from the sphere of sensibility.

Ontology, with its transcendental doctrines, avails not in the eyes of the German philosopher to explain the nature and origin of things. "These principles," he says, "are simply principles of the exposition of phenomena; and the proud name of an ontology which pretends to give an a priori, synthetic cognition of things, in a systematic doctrine, for example, the principle of causality, ought to be replaced by the modest denomination of simple analysis of the pure understanding."

67. It would be hard to find a more noxious doctrine. What is left to the human mind when all means of rising from the sensible sphere are taken away? To what is our understanding reduced, if its most fundamental ideas, and its noblest principles can teach nothing concerning the nature of things? If the corporeal world is for us nothing but a collection of sensible phenomena, beyond which we can know nothing, our cognitions have nothing real, they are all purely subjective; the soul lives on illusions, and vanishes with its imaginary creations, to which there is nothing to correspond in reality. Space is but a subjective form; time is but a subjective form; pure ideas are empty conceptions, and all in us is subjective. We know nothing of objects, we are totally ignorant of what is; we know only what appears. This is pure skepticism; assuredly it was not necessary to consume so much time in analytical investigations to get thus far. The doctrine of Kant presents no extravagance so outrageous, no error so hideous, as the works of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; but it contains the germ of the greatest extravagance, and of the most fatal errors. He has made a philosophical revolution, which some have incautiously deemed a progress; but doubtless they did not detect the skepticism it contains, which is the more dangerous, the more it is enveloped in analytical forms.

68. Notwithstanding the importance justly attached to the refutation of the German philosopher's errors, I do not deem it necessary to combat his doctrines step by step; this system of refutation labors under the serious objection that it gives little satisfaction to the reader, who seems to see one edifice torn down, but not replaced by another. I consider it more useful carefully to examine questions as they arise in the order of their subjects, to establish my opinion as best I can, and there to refute Kant's errors as I find them obstructing the march of truth. It is ordinarily very easy to say what a thing is not; but it is not so easy to say what it is; and it is not proper that the advocates of sound doctrine should be charged with impugning false doctrines, and not caring to expose their own. We believe that in these matters sound philosophy may be presented to the light of the day struggling against error, and that it ought not to rest satisfied with being the instrument of war to overthrow its adversary, but that it should aspire to found a noble and enduring edifice upon the very site the other occupied.

The minds of men are not satisfied with simple refutations; they desire to have a doctrine substituted in the place of the one impugned. Whoever impugns, denies; and the understanding is not satisfied with negations; it wants affirmation, for it cannot live without positive truth.

We have permitted ourselves this brief digression, which is indeed far from being useless; for at the sight of the transcendency of the German philosopher's errors I have recollected the necessity of careful, assiduous, and profound labor to oppose this deluge of errors which threatens to inundate the whole field of truth; and we could not do less than insist upon this point, and observe that it is not enough to tear down, but that it is also necessary to build up. Refutations will soon come; but let positive doctrines abound. It is not enough to cover the long line of frontiers where error makes its attacks, with light and active troops which may fall upon the enemy; it is necessary to found colonies, foci of cultivation and civilization, who will defend the country, at the same time that they make it flourish and prosper.