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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



Infinite would annihilate him no less than a disso- 

 lution into primary atoms. His individuality ex- 

 ists and maintains itself only in opposition to all 

 the rest. Independent active force is the true 

 character of all things in the world." 



TIIE INTELLECT ACCORDING TO LOCKE, KANT, SCHO- 

 PENHAUER, AND NOIRE. 



What Noire takes away with him from Leib- 

 nitz are the monads, or, as he prefers to call them, 

 the mona, leaving the preestablished harmony in 

 the same philosophical lumber-room with the con- 

 cursus divinus, and pronouncing no opinion on the 

 necessity of admitting, beyond all individual mo- 

 nads, one supreme or creative monad. Having 

 settled his accounts with Leibnitz, Noire has next 

 to pass through the ordeal of Locke, and to de- 

 fend his mona from becoming mere canvas, or 

 tabula rasa. What are the monads with which 

 he undertakes to build up the world ; and, more 

 particularly, what are those monads of which we 

 have to predicate the old Cartesian Cogito ? The 

 so-called faculties or* the soul had long ago been 

 destroyed by Spinoza, the innate ideas had fallen 

 under the strokes of Locke. Well did Herder 

 say : ' " All the forces and faculties of our souls, 

 and of animal souls, are nothing but metaphysical 

 abstraction. They are effects, subdivided by us, 

 because our weak mind cannot grasp them as one. 

 They are arranged in chapters, not because in 

 Nature they act in chapters, but because an ap- 

 prentice apprehends them most easily in this 

 manner. In reality, the whole soul acts every- 

 where undivided." In Locke's philosophy there 

 remained nothing but the perceiving subject as 

 tabula rasa on one side, and on the other the ob- 

 jective world, throwing its picture on the white 

 surface of the soul. Nothing was in the intellect 

 except what had come into it through the senses ; 

 and if Leibnitz rejoined, "No, nothing, except the 

 intellect itself," the next question clearly, which 

 philosophy, in its historical progress, had to an- 

 swer, was, " What, then, is that intellect ? " 



The answer was given from two opposite quar- 

 ters, by the philesophers of France and by the 

 philosophers of Germany. Penser c'est sentir, was 

 the answer of Condillac, La Mettrie, and Diderot. 

 Kant's answer was the " Critik der reinen Ver- 

 minft," giving to the world what is the only pos- 

 sible definition of the intellect, i. e., the fixing of its 

 limits. What these limits are, according to Kant, 

 is well known by this time to all students of phi- 

 losophy. Man can possess a knowledge of phe- 

 nomena only; what lies beyond the phenomenal 



1 Noire, " TJ-rsprnng der Sprache," p. 47- 



world is beyond his perception and conception. 

 Space and time are the inevitable forms of his 

 sensuous perception, the categories the inevitable 

 forms of his mental conception. These forms of 

 perception and conception are, according to Kant, 

 neither innate or cognate, but inevitable, irremov- 

 able; they cannot be thought away, as he ex- 

 presses it, when we speak of perception and con- 

 ception. They are contained in them as light is 

 contained in color, as number is contained in 

 counting, analytically, not synthetically. They 

 are that without which thought could not be con- 

 ceived as possible in man. If it made their nature 

 more intelligible, there would be no harm in call- 

 ing them laws of sense, and laws of thought. 



Within the charmed circle described by Kant, 

 the human intellect is safe ; outside it, it becomes 

 entangled in antinomies or inevitable contradic- 

 tions, without finding any criterion of its own to 

 solve them. According to Kant, we have on one 

 side man, imprisoned within the walls of his 

 senses, and with no more freedom of movement 

 than the categories or the chains of his intellect 

 will allow him ; on the other side we have a world, 

 of which we know nothing except that it is, and 

 that by its passing shadows it disturbs the repose 

 of our prison. 



As far as the prisoner is concerned, nothing 

 that later philosophers have added has materially 

 changed his position. Space and time have re- 

 mained, what Kant was the first to prove them 

 to be, necessary forms of our sensuous intuition. 

 The number of the categories has been changed, 

 and by some philosophers, in particular by Scho- 

 penhauer, they have been reduced to one, the 

 category of causality, as the one primary form of 

 all human thought. Thus armed, the subject, or, 

 as we might say with Noire, the monos, expects 

 the mona. 



But what about these mona? What about 

 the outside world ? Can we really know it only 

 as it appears ? Can we predicate nothing of it ? 

 It is from this question that the most powerful 

 impulse to philosophic thought proceeded. We 

 might follow the stream of philosophy which, start- 

 ing from this point, and following the course in- 

 dicated by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, seems for 

 the present, like the river Saras vati, to be lost 

 beneath the ground. But Noire calls us away 

 from -that enchanted valley, and bids us follow 

 him in another direction, from Kant to Schopen- 

 hauer, and then onward to his own system. 



The transition from Kant to Schopenhauer is 

 easy, and may be stated in the form of a single 

 syllogism. He accepts all that Kant teaches about 



