152 THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC. 



class or universe of all that is conceivable. We have thus the three forms 

 (or, as they are called by Kant, categories} of unity, plurality, and totality ; 

 conditions essential to the possibility of thought in general, and which may, 

 therefore, be regarded as a priori elements of reflective consciousness derived 

 from the constitution of the understanding itself. . . . They are thus dis 

 tinguished from the matter, or empirical contents, by which one object of 

 thought is distinguished from another.&quot; 1 



We shall see later (88, cf. 15) how Kant attributes the necessity and uni 

 versality of certain of our judgments to these subjective forms of thought, 

 denying that those characteristics have any basis in the reality which furnishes 

 the materials or data of thought, and concluding that those judgments do 

 not reveal to us the nature of real things as they are in themselves. But 

 his categories are really not mere subjective forms of thought : they classify 

 its data, its contents. We may say of all of them what Mansel says of two of 

 them : &quot; the two most important those of substance and cause present 

 features which distinguish them from mere forms of thought &quot;. 2 They are 

 represented by Kantians as a collection of the forms in which the mind must 

 interpret reality, and as arrived at by an analysis of the cognitive faculties, 

 considered antecedently to all experience (&quot; apriori &quot;). But they are, in fact, 

 based on the traditionally recognized heads or forms under which the under 

 standing dW.r predicate : on the logical forms of the judgment and unfortun 

 ately, too, on a defective and unscientific arrangement of those forms. There 

 is, for instance, no real ground for distinguishing negative from infinite 

 judgments under Quality ; nor for the threefold division under the head of 

 Modality. They are, therefore, just as empirical, as dependent on experi 

 ence, as Aristotle s were ; but their advocates put forward for them an ex 

 travagant and groundless claim that was never seriously advanced for the 

 Aristotelean categories ; the claim to be an absolutely and necessarily com 

 plete enumeration of all the cognitive forms with which the mind must be 

 equipped in order to make conscious thought possible. 



But apart from the fundamental difference in the respective standpoints 

 from which Aristotle and Kant approached the question of classifying the 

 ultimate categories of thought, there is very little real diversity in the results 

 which the two philosophers reached. Aristotle s standpoint was objective ; 

 Kant s subjective: &quot;Aristotle had sought to enumerate the kinds of being 

 found in the different things that were ; Kant was interested rather in the 

 question how there came to be for us objects having these diverse modes of 

 being.&quot; 3 



Aristotle and the Scholastics worked on the general assumption that these 

 &quot; modes of being &quot; were real, in the sense that they were there in the reality, 

 and were apprehended or recognized not created and superimposed on the 

 reality by the mind, though they were far indeed from accepting or propound 

 ing the &quot; passive &quot; view of the mind which is characteristic rather of the teach 

 ing of Locke, Hume, Mill, and the Empirical school generally. But Kant erred 

 by excess in his reaction against the latter view : &quot; He maintained that in the 

 apprehension of them [the modes of being ] we are not merely receptive 



1 MANSEL, Metaphysics (pp. 192-3), apud WELTON, op. cit. t p. 105. 



2 ibid. 3 JOSEPH, op. cit., p. 48. 



