Oyonale - 3D art and graphic experiments
ThinkSpam
Click on the phrases to see them in context. The original texts by Immanuel Kant and David Hume are available from the Gutenberg Projet.
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The world has no beginning, and no limits in space, but is, in relation both to time and space, infinite. In like manner, it will be made manifest in the detailed explanation of these ideas--how reason, merely through the synthetical use of the same function which it employs in a categorical syllogism, necessarily attains to the conception of the absolute unity of the thinking subject--how the logical procedure in hypothetical ideas necessarily produces the idea of the absolutely unconditioned in a series of given conditions, and finally--how the mere form of the disjunctive syllogism involves the highest conception of a being of all beings; a thought which at first sight seems in the highest degree paradoxical. The first thing which must be given to us for the sake of the a priori cognition of all objects, is the diversity of the pure intuition; the synthesis of this diversity by means of the imagination is the second; but this gives, as yet, no cognition. But in this case they would augment the number of the categories; which cannot be. 1. Reason, as observed in the syllogistic process, is not applicable to intuitions, for the purpose of subjecting them to rules--for this is the province of the understanding with its categories--but to conceptions and judgements. I have already observed, that power, as distinguished from its exercise, has either no meaning at all, or is nothing but a possibility or probability of existence; by which any object approaches to reality, and has a sensible influence on the mind. The general representation which we form in our minds of the series of all past states or conditions of the world, or of all the things which at present exist in it, is itself nothing more than a possible empirical regress, which is cogitated--although in an undetermined manner--in the mind, and which gives rise to the conception of a series of conditions for a given object.* Now I have a conception of the universe, but not an intuition--that is, not an intuition of it as a whole. Now the principle of contradiction as a merely logical proposition must not by any means limit its application merely to relations of time, and consequently a formula like the preceding is quite foreign to its true purpose. But to synthetical judgements a priori, such aid is entirely wanting.