150 THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC. 



idealism, he reduced everything, all Being, to &quot; Sensations &quot; plus &quot; Per 

 manent Possibilities of Sensations &quot;.* 



Rejecting as invalid and insufficient, all grounds for believing in the reality 

 of anything apart and distinct from the flow of his own transient conscious 

 states, his feelings and sensations, he concluded that mind and matter were 

 merely &quot; permanent possibilities &quot; of such feelings and sensations, and that 

 all the categories could be reduced to these. Only, if he were thoroughly 

 consistent he might have seen that on his own assumption those &quot; permanent 

 possibilities &quot; could stand for nothing real, apart from the element of ex 

 pectation in the transient feelings as they flowed onwards ; and he should 

 have therefore reduced all Being to one supreme category : FEELING. 



77. THE KANTIAN CATEGORIES. The philosophers whose schemes 

 have been so far mentioned aimed at a classification of the modes in which 

 the matter or objects of our concepts reveal themselves to our minds, i.e. a 

 classification of concepts according to the reality represented by these con 

 cepts : and this is true even of those who, like Aristotle, regarded the latter 

 not in themselves absolutely, but as predicates, as means of interpreting sub 

 jects to the mind in the act of judgment. Every objective concept present to 

 the intellect appears there as a definite or determinate reality : it involves both 

 knowing and being, and the modes that determine it those philosophers re 

 garded as modes of known being, not raising the question whether the modes 

 sprang from the knowing mind or from the reality. In other words, they did 

 not distinguish between the matter of knowledge whether sentient or in 

 tellectual and \\.s forms. No doubt, they recognized external and internal 

 sensation, imagination, abstraction, comparison, judgment, etc. (i, 2, 3), as 

 so many modes or processes or functions, in and through which we acquire 

 knowledge. But they did not conceive conscious knowledge as the result of 

 an application of certain subjective or mental grooves, or forms, to certain 

 data or materials coming from the region of the extramental into the domain 

 of consciousness. 



The philosopher whose name is inseparably associated with this latter 

 conception of sense cognition and intellectual judgment is the German 

 philosopher, IMMANUEL KANT (1724-1804). According to him, the reason 

 why our external senses apprehend their data as existing in space, and why 

 our internal senses imagination and memory reveal to us all their data as 

 existing in time, is because those sense faculties of ours are endowed with 

 two innate grooves or forms of sense cognition the forms of &quot; space &quot; and 

 &quot; time &quot; into which all sense data run. And similarly, the reason why our 

 understanding is capable of interpreting or judging about these &quot; spatial &quot; 

 and &quot; temporal &quot; products of sense-intuition, or, in other words, the reason 

 why we are able to gain further knowledge about them (for knowledge is 

 embodied in judgment), is because our understanding is able to apply to them 

 a further and richer collection of innate forms or grooves with which it is 

 equipped. These latter, subjective elements of knowledge, Kant calls the 

 Categories of the Understanding. Whatever we call them, the essential 

 feature of Kant s theory is that they belong to the form of thought, not to its 

 matter or content ; that they are subjective contributions to the total known 



} Cf. WELTON, Logic, pp. 101-3. 



