FURTHER ANALYSIS OF THE UNIVERSE.
In a previous chapter, some special reference has been made to a little
German professor named Immanuel Kant. He was born at Koenigsberg, in 1724.
In 1781 he wrote a book which he called "The Critique of Pure Reason."
This provokingly modest title, as already said, covered, in reality, _the
analysis of mind and matter, time and space_. It was the most far-reaching
piece of purely intellectual work that had ever been given to the world.
It has split the heads of hundreds of "philosophers." Certain thinkers
have fancied they have thought beyond it, and have supposed it to be laid
on the shelf of "deceased philosophy." Meanwhile, we are told, the
universities "are returning to the study of Kant." Better still, some of
them are even beginning to understand him. Here we shall take him
straight, paying no attention to any of the side issues in which he was
apt to cover himself up.[56]
Kant, so learned that he was said to "know everything," was completely
acquainted with the whole trend of British philosophy, from John Locke to
David Hume. He was saturated, too, with the physical sciences. So his
first real step in his _Critique of Pure Reason_ was to found himself on
the all-inclusive law of scientific idealism. Immanuel Kant did not fool
with this law. He did not test it, prove it, and then let it slip out of a
loose, greasy mind, as an airy nothing of no practical consequence. He
grasped it, and held it, as the bed-rock of all thought and all things. It
is a pity he omitted to say so at the very first touch of his work. But he
said it clearly enough when he happened to get ready. Thus, for
instance:[57]
"In order to prevent any misunderstanding, it will be requisite, in the
first place, to recapitulate, as clearly as possible, what our opinion is
with respect to _the fundamental nature of our sensuous cognition in
general_. We have intended, then, to say that all our intuition is nothing
but the re-presentation of phenomena; that the things which we intuite are
not in themselves the same as our re-presentations of them in intuition,
nor are their relations so constituted as they appear to us; and that _if
we take away the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of our
senses in general_, then _not only the nature and relations of objects_ in
space and time, _but even space and time themselves disappear_.... What
may be the nature of objects considered as things in themselves, and
without reference to the receptivity of our sensibility, is quite unknown
to us."
Again, in closing his dissection of space, Kant said:
"Objects are quite unknown to us in themselves, and _what we call outward
objects_ are nothing else but mere _re-presentations of our sensibility_,
whose form is space, but whose real correlate, the thing in itself, is not
known by means of these representations, nor ever can be, but respecting
which, in experience, no inquiry is ever made."
Once more:
"The faculty of sensibility not only does not present us with any
indistinct and confused cognition of objects as things in themselves, but,
in fact, gives us _no knowledge of these_ at all. On the contrary, as soon
as we abstract in thought _our own subjective nature_, the object
re-presented, with the properties ascribed to it by sensuous intuition,
_entirely disappears, because it was only this subjective nature that
determined the form of the object as a phenomenon_."
After awhile, under the maddening caption of "The Possibility of a
Conjunction of the Manifold Representations given by Sense,"[58] our
German professor virtually crowded his whole work into this one paragraph:
"The manifold content in our re-presentations can be given in an intuition
which is merely sensuous--in other words, is nothing but susceptibility;
and the form of this intuition can exist _a priori_ in our faculty of
representation, without being anything else but the mode in which the
subject is affected. But the conjunction (_conjunctio_) of a manifold in
intuition never can be given by the senses; it cannot therefore be
contained in the pure form of sensuous intuition, for it is a spontaneous
act of the faculty of re-presentation. And as we must, to distinguish it
from sensibility, entitle this faculty _understanding_, so all
conjunction, whether conscious or unconscious, be it of the manifold in
intuition, sensuous or non-sensuous, or of several conceptions, is an act
of the understanding. To this act we shall give the general appellation of
_synthesis_, thereby to indicate, at the same time, that _we cannot
represent anything as conjoined in the object without having previously
conjoined it ourselves_."
As to comprehend this paragraph is to analyze the universe, let us grapple
with it.
Impatient Dr. Sam. Johnson once kicked a stone to refute Berkeley. Let us
take that stone, as a clump of matter, and treat it with the head instead
of the foot.
"The manifold content in our re-presentations," says Kant, "can be given
in an intuition which is merely sensuous." This means simply that the
various properties of the "re-presentation" or "intuition" called a stone
are "effects on the senses." The color, the texture, the weight, the
size--every one of all such "material" attributes--exist, as they are,
solely by relation to _me_, or to some other being in whom is organized
the element of "sense." Matter is _made_ of impact--impact between its
objective background ("the noumenon" or "noumena") and some sort or degree
of subjectivity. Without these two terms, their product of interaction,
their third term, matter, is _not_. So "the manifold content" of a
"re-presentation"--or, what is the same thing, the properties of a
material object--are "nothing but susceptibility."
By "the form of intuition," Kant meant, as he has repeatedly explained,
the _plural quality_ of space and time. Space is made of _spaces_; time of
_times_; and the plural contents (always such) of matter can only exist
under the plural contents of space and time--that is, in sections of space
and sequences of time, these sections and sequences being the intrinsic
character, the divisible quality, the essential "form" of space and time
as total units or completed things. And the nature of space and time need
not be anything more _objective_ than the nature of matter in general, but
can be derived, too, from "the mode in which the subject is affected."
"But," says Kant, "_all conjunction_" is "an act of the understanding,"
and "can not be contained in the pure form of sensuous intuition"; by
which he means that time could never be a conjunct of times, space a
conjunct of spaces, nor a stone the conjunct of its properties--each a
"synthesis" of a "manifold content"--unless made so by the synthetical
unity of _a priori_ mind.
Kant attributes "_unconscious_" action to the "_understanding_"--the
unconscious action of "conjunction" or "synthesis." His phrase has been a
perpetual stumbling-block to his readers, but he meant exactly what he
said. Unconscious mental synthesis is what he afterward designated as "the
synthesis of _apprehension_."
"By the term _synthesis_ of apprehension [said he], I understand the
combination of the manifold in an empirical intuition, whereby perception,
that is, empirical consciousness of the intuition (as phenomenon), is
possible."
Kant talks of "making the empirical intuition of a house into a
perception, by apprehension of the manifold contained therein," and says
that "the _necessary unity of space_ and of my _external sensuous
intuition_ lies at the foundation of this act." The "manifold" contained
in an "empirical intuition"--take the stone we have used for an
example--is simply the diversity of "properties," constituting the
object--the color, texture, size, weight, and the rest of them; and these
properties are "effects of sense." Every one of them is a relation to
subjectivity, a result of impact _on_ subjectivity, and is in the _object_
only as reflecting or _re_-presenting there the sensuous nature of a
_subject_. But these various "effects on various senses," these merely
subjective separates--how do they _get united_ into _one thing_? What
constitutes the unity of sensuous manifolds? Every phenomenon being an
essential plurality--a lot of "sense-effects"--what closes together the
various effects on various human senses, called the properties of a stone,
into the one phenomenal object, the stone itself. To this end there must
be some common subjective ground of those subjective things, "effects on
sense." There must be some subjective unity in which those subjective
pluralities all merge, for only as _merged_ do they get to be an _object_.
Now, a common subjective ground of various effects on various senses can
only be a common _awareness of them_--a _synthetical unity of
apprehension_, or just instinctive, automatic consciousness in the germ.
This must be common to all the senses together, and to each sense
separately. What, for example, is seeing, but the simple awareness of
sight? What is touch, but the simple awareness of feeling? What is any
"intuition," which means any taking-in of any phenomenon, but a common
awareness, however rudimental or developed, of some conjoined diversity of
effects on sense?
It must be added here, as vital to the full comprehension of the genesis
of matter, that not only every material object, like our example, the
stone, is made of essential plurality of sense-effects, but that _every
separate property_ of an object is also made of like plurality. No object,
and no property of an object, is, or can be, single, unal, or, in other
words, _anything_, until constructed so, in sense, by the "unconscious
understanding" thereof--the synthetical unity of instinctive, automatic
"apprehension." To realize this fact, it is only necessary to remember
that every property of anything, say the hardness of a stone, is a
compound relation between the impact of some ultimate non-ego on the sense
of touch, and the peculiar nature of the sense itself: so the property of
hardness must contain _essential diversity_, something from each of _two
fundamental sources_. As Aristotle, from his ontological investigations,
found that matter, if regarded as an absolute independence--an unrelated
thing in itself--is _no thing_, but only chaotic
indeterminateness--formless "potentiality"--so Kant, from his
psychological inquiry--his dissection of phenomena as existent through
perception--found the same truth in deeper significance. The _entire
principle of unity_, Whether in a feeling, a thought, a material object,
or the universe as a whole, _can only exist through the principle of
mind_.
Here is the very bottom of the discoveries of Kant, and the basis, also,
of all things.
Mind, then, in its lowest state, is what Kant, "to distinguish it from
sensibility," entitled "unconscious understanding." There used to be an
old saw in philosophy--still, indeed, at work--to the effect that "there
is nothing in the mind that was not first in sense." Leibnitz, adding a
piece to the saw, said: "Except mind itself." Leibnitz affirmed, that is,
that sense always _contains_ mind--that mind is _in_ sense as a component
of it, and that without mind there is no sense at all. What Leibnitz
perceived and asserted, Kant _proved_ by "observation and induction"--by
analyzing phenomena under the law of scientific idealism. Mind in
sense--the mind of sense--is just _automatic animal awareness_, just
"simple apprehension," undeveloped, and in the lowest animal life not to
be developed, into "apperception," the _conscious_ stage of understanding,
capable of forming a _concept_.
Well, in the genesis of a stone, or any other material object, certain
effects on sense are merged in the unit they compose, by reception into
the "synthetical unity of apprehension." The stone is _created_ in this
way. Its own objective unity--its wholeness, or "_form_" as a stone--is
thus the derivation, the manufactured product, of _subjectivity as a
cosmic element_, an element "_a priori_" to the existence of any possible
phenomenon.
The stone, however, _is_ unmistakably objective--is just the palpable
thing that everybody takes it to be, out there in space. This is a given
_fact of perception_--something, as Kant said, "never questioned in
experience." As such _fact_, how can it be accounted for, when we know, at
the same time, that the stone is nothing but a plexus of subjective
states? How does the bunch of _internal impressions_ get _externalized_?
What is the cause of this reflex, this "_re_-presentation"? It must be
something inherent in the principle of _apprehension itself_, or the
plexus of impressions would necessarily stay within us. Being wrought
internally, it would remain internal. Hence, this "apprehension"--this
element of instinctive synthetical awareness--must be in its nature a
_double_--an entity which reproduces, or throws out before itself,
whatever lot of sense-effects it receptively synthesizes, or binds
together in a sheaf, known as some object. But all this, summed up, means
only that mind, even in its lowest form of "unconscious
understanding"--the simple automatic apprehension which shuts together
certain effects on sense into a totality of them--must, _as being
apprehension_, necessarily, though instinctively, apprehended its own
product. Here is the full explanation of the amusing, iron-clad conception
of Hobbes, that an "image," or a "color," is but an apparition unto us of
"motion, agitation, or alteration" in some "internal substance of the
head."
The self-reflexiveness of "apprehension" is precisely the same thing, _in
germ_, that the self-reflexiveness of "apperception" is, in _full
self-consciousness_.
The self-reflexiveness of apprehension, in the manufacture of phenomena,
was named by Kant "_the transcendental synthesis of imagination_"--the
word "imagination" standing on its roots, and meaning _the image-making
faculty_. Phenomena, as reflex-conjuncts of sense-effects, are
"produced"--put out--by this second function of apprehension; so Kant said
he sometimes called it "productive imagination." It is that function of
pure elemental, or _a priori_ awareness, which "_re_-presents" itself in
the constitution of every object, as its _unity_, but a unity _shaped_
according to some object's filling of senses-effects. Hence Kant says:
"This synthesis of the manifold of sensuous intuition, which is possible
and necessary _a priori_, may be called figurative synthesis (_synthesis
speciosa_)."
Thus Kant found mind in sense, "unconscious understanding," the
instinctive awareness of animal susceptibility, as it existed in himself,
to be the literal objective basis of all phenomena--the first "material"
unity of every "material thing." And he found this elemental source of all
unity to be an innate self-activity--a self-seeing mirror, as it were--a
double of receptiveness and reflectiveness. Here, at last, was the actual,
_living thing_, of which Locke's "blank-tablet" had long been the
still-born, stone figure.
Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his remarkable investigation of "The Principles of
Psychology," posits "mind" as always implied in sentiency, and as
necessary to the genesis of any phenomenon, even the "first nervous shock"
of a sensitive being. Recognizing the law of scientific idealism, he has
seen, too, that our objective world is made up, at the perceptional
outset, of such shocks. Again, he has proved, with great detail, that the
action of mind is always of one general nature, whether in the lowest
animal instinct or the highest conscious reason. But back at the first
nervous shock, Mr. Spencer _stops_ with mind, and says that at the next
regress it becomes "unknowable." Yet nearly a hundred years before this
investigation Kant showed precisely what this so-called "unknowable" _is_.
He showed that mind, in all stages and states--mind in itself--is a
synthetical unity of awareness. In germ, as "unconscious
understanding"--as the mind of sense--its function is to be simply
apprehensive of, and thus to conjoin in its instinctive cognizance, some
"manifold" contained in a "nervous shock," or in various sense-effects,
into some _unity_; which then, as _itself apprehended_, or _made a
reflex_, becomes an impression, an image, an object.