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NATURE 
| 2d. 10, 1870 
every facility afforded. If this be not the duty of the State it is 
difficult to explain its raison d'etre. 
The question from the economical point of view is—Shall we 
pay heavy rates for prisons and workhouses, or shall we try to 
lighten them by the spread of education ? It is well to remember 
that the law of supply and demand will not avail here, for they 
who most want it are the least likely to ask for instruction. 
Perhaps, Mr. Wallace’s chief objection is to the unsatisfactory 
way the money raised by rating, is expended. And here is room 
for large reforms, if not retrenchment. His proposal regarding 
the British Museum seems admirable. It is painful to see what 
excellent opportunities for teaching those who really require it, 
are lost in that magnificent collection, for want of a little, a very 
fittle, more expense and trouble. 
“hese remarks are made from the very lowest stand-point, the 
principle of self-interest—a principle, I believe, your correspon- 
dant would heartily despise ; for the man of science is essentially 
liberal, essentially averse to huckstering calculations of profit 
and loss, essentially unqualified for scrambling after loaves and 
fishes, BiG le 
Kant’s View of Space 
I Am quite willing to leave the readers of NaTuRE and the 
students of Kant to decide on the propriety, in English philo- 
sophical discourse, of calling Space and Time ‘‘forms of 
Thought,” the more so as Sir W. Hamilton—a great stickler for 
philosophic precision—uses the term in that sense and would 
have been surprised to hear that he had misrepresented Kant in 
so doing. My opponents persist in limiting the term Thought to 
the restricted meaning given to it in Kant’s terminology, which, 
in English, is restricting it to Conception or Judgment : on this 
ground they might deny that Imagination or Recollection could be 
properly spoken of as Thought. Throughout I have accepted 
Thought as equivalent to mental activity. in general and the 
**forms of Thought” as the conditions of such activity. The 
“forms of Thought” are the forms which the thinking principle 
(Kant’s fuze Reason) brings with it, antecedent to all experience. 
The thinking principle acts through three distinct faculties: Sensi- 
bility (Intuition), Understanding (Conception), and Reason 
(Ratiocination) : to suppose Thought absent from Intuition, is to 
reduce Intuition to mere sensuous impression. Therefore, what- 
ever is a form of Intuition must be a form of Thought. 
The following passage from Mr. Mahaffy’s valuable transla- 
tion of Kuno Fischers work on Kant, may here be useful : 
“Sensibility and understanding are cognitive faculties differing 
not in degree but in kind, and form the two original faculties of 
the human mind”... . The general problem of a Critick of 
the Reason ‘‘ is subdivided into two particular objects, as human 
Reason is into two particular faculties of knowledge. ‘The first 
object is the investigation of the sensibility ; the second, that of 
the understanding. The first question is, How is rational 
knowledge possible through sensibility? The second question, 
How is the same knowledge possible through the understand- 
ing?” (pp. 4, 5-) 
Those who maintain that it is improper to speak of Space and 
Time as forms of Thought, must either maintain that Kant held 
Sensibility #o¢ to be a faculty of the Mind (thinking principle) ; 
or that the term Thought is o/, in English discourse, a correct 
expression for the activity of the thinking principle. I be- 
lieve that the student will agree with me in saying that, 
although Kant restricted the term Thought to what we call 
Conception or Judgment, he understood by the activity of the 
mental faculties (Pure Reason) what we understand by Thought. 
It is not, however, to continue this discussion that I again 
trespass on your space ; but to reply to the personal part of Mr. 
Sylvester’s letter. He charges me with misquoting myself and 
with misquoting him. I said that, in my exposition, Space and 
Time were uniformly spoken of as forms of Intuition and I say 
so still, Mr. Sylvester has taken the trouble of reading that 
exposition without taking the trouble of understanding it ; he 
declares that he ‘‘has marked the word intuition as occurring 
once and forms of sensibility several times ; but forms of in- 
tuition never.” His cave/ulness may be estimated by the fact 
that the word intuition occurs fou times on the two pages : his 
comprehension by the fact that it is perfectly indifferent whether 
Sensibility or Intuition be the term employed, since sensibility 
is the faculty and Intuition the action of that faculty. Mr. 
Sylvester, not understanding this, says ‘‘ If form of sensibility is 
as good to use as form of intuition, form of understanding ought 
to be as good as form of thought; but Mr. Lewes owns that 
the former is indefensible, whilst he avers that the latter is 
correct.” Considering that this passage occurs in a letter which 
charges me with unfair misquotation, it is curious. So far from 
owning that the former is ‘‘ indefensible,” it is what I declare to 
be true; and, with regard to the latter, though I do think a 
form of Understanding is a form of Thought, my statement was 
altogether away from it, namely, that Space and Time as 
forms of Sensibility, would be incorrectly spoken of as forms of 
the Understanding. 
With regard to the alleged misquotation of his own words, 
which he characterises as unfair and as “ too much like fighting 
with poisoned weapons,” it was a charge which both astonished 
and pained me. There are few things for which I have a bitterer 
contempt than taking such unfair advantages of an adversary. I 
beg to apologise to Professor Sylvester for any misrepresen- 
tation which, unintentionally, I may have been guilty of. But, in 
accepting his denial of the construction I placed upon his lan- 
guage, I must still say that, after re-reading his letter, I am at a 
loss to see what other construction it admits of, that has any 
bearing on the dispute, and that he has not expressed his 
meaning with sufficient clearness. Intuition and Thought are 
there compared with Force and Energy as terms ‘‘ not convert- 
ible” ; Force is detached from Energy as potential from actual 
and Intuition without Thought, is made to hold an analogous 
position. Here is the passage ; let the reader judge :— 
“Can Mr. Lewes point to any passage in Kant where Space 
and Time are designated forms of Thought? I shall indeed be 
surprised if he can do so—as much surprised as if Mr. Todhunter 
or Mr. Routh in their Mechanical Treatises were to treat exergy 
and fovce as convertible terms. To such a misuse of the word 
energy it would be little to the point to urge that force without 
energy is a mere potential tendency. It is just as little to the 
point, in the matter at issue, for Mr. Lewes to inform the readers 
of NaTuRE that intuition without thought is mere sensuous 
umnpression.” 
Is it to use *‘ poisoned weapons” to interpret this as assuming 
that Intuition and Thought differ as potential and actual ? Irepeat 
that, since Mr. Sylvester disclaims the interpretation, my only 
course is to apologise for it ; but, after his own misinterpretations 
of me, he will not, I hope, persist in attributing mine to a desire 
to take an unfair advantage. If I make no reply to the other 
points roused in the various letters it is in order not to prolong 
the discussion. 
ec 
GEORGE HENRY LEWES 
I po not know whether Mr. Sylvester and Dr. Ingleby will 
be satisfied with Mr. Lewes’ letter in yours of the 27th. I am 
not and [ think, in defending his former mistake, Mr. Lewes has 
fallen into additional errors. 
It is undoubtedly fair to translate an author into your own 
language before criticising him, provided you found no criticism 
on the language that you have put into his mouth. But this I 
think Mr. Lewes has done. He accuses Kant of inconsistency 
in speaking of pure @ rior? cognitions, when, on his own system, 
pure thought only supplies one elesent to these cognitions, the 
other being derived from sense or intuition. Now (not to insist 
here that Kant constantly uses the term cognition in a wider 
sense than that which Mr. Lewes insists on fastening upon him), 
this criticism is evidently invalidated by the simple remark that 
Kant admits pure intuitions, as well as pure concepts and ex- 
plains the nature of mathematics, as a system of @ f7zort cognitions, 
by the fact that its object-matter consists of nothing but pure 
intuitions. 
Mr. Lewes now informs us that Kant’s Intuition and Thought 
“*differ as species and genus.” According to Kant they differ in 
kind ; and Liebnitz was as wrong in making sensibility a species 
of thought as Locke was in making Thought a species of sen- 
sibility. Space and Time, Mr. Lewes adds, are forms of 
“‘mental activity” and, therefore, are properly termed ‘‘ forms 
of Thought,” in the meaning of the latter term which is usually 
current in this country. If they were forms of mental activity 
they would be forms of Thought, according to Kant, likewise ; 
for the criterion by which Kant distinguishes between Intuition 
and Thought (under which term he includes both the under- 
standing proper and the reason proper) is that, in the former, the 
mind is passive (receptive) while, in the latter, it is spontaneously 
active ; and it is precisely on this ground—the passive reception 
of them by the mind—that he refers Space and Time to Sensibility 
rather than Thought. This is repeatedly brought out in the 
Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. See in particular 
Sections 11 (Meiklejohn, p. 80) and 18 (Meiklejohn, p. 9c). 
