only the mode in which we are affected by objects. On the other hand, the faculty of thinking the object of sevisuous intuition, is the understanding. Neither of these faculties hes a preference over the other. Without the sensuous faculty no object would be given to us, and without the understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without conceptions, blind. Hence it is as necessary for the mind to make its conceptions sensuous (that is, to join to them the object in intuition), as to make its intuitions intelligible (that is, to bring them under conceptions). Neither of these faculties can exchange its proper function. Understanding cannot intuite, and the sensuous faculty cannot think. In no other way than from the united operation of both, can knowledge arise. But no one ought, on this account, to overlook the difference of the elements contributed by each; we have rather great reason carefully to separate and distinguish them. We therefore distinguish the science of the laws of sensibility, that is, Æsthetic, from the science of the laws of the understanding, that is, Logic.
Now, logic in its turn may be considered as twofold,—namely, as logic of the general [universal],[1] or of the particular
- ↑ Logic is nothing but the science of the laws of thought, as thought. It concerns itself only with the form of thought, and takes no cognizance of the matter—that is, of the infinitude of the objects to which thought is applied.Now Kant is wrong, when he divides logic into logic of the general and of the particular use of the understanding.He says the logic of the particular use of the understanding contains the laws of right thinking upon any particular set of objects. This sort of logic he calls the organon of this or that science. It is difficult to discover what he means by his logic of the particular use of the understanding. From his description, we are left in doubt whether he means by this logic induction, that is, the organon of science in general, or the laws which regulate the objects, a science of which he seeks to establish.—In either case, the application of the term logic is inadmissible. To regard logic as the organon of science, is absurd, as indeed Kant himself afterwards shows (p. 51). It knows nothing of this or that object. The matter employed in syllogisms is used for the sake of example only; all forms of syllogisms might be expressed in signs. Logicians have never been able clearly to see this. They have never been able clearly to define the extent of their science, to know, in fact, what their science really treated of. They have never seen that it has to do only with the formal, and never with the material in thought. The science has broken down its proper barriers to let in contributions from metaphysics, psychology, &c. It is common enough, for example, to say that Bacon’s Novum Organum entirely super-
