THE METAPHYSICAL FOUNDATIONS
OF NATURAL SCIENCE.
PREFACE.
If the word Nature be merely taken in its formal signification, there may be as many natural sciences as there are specifically different things (for each must contain the inner principle special to the determinations pertaining to its existence), inasmuch as it [Nature] signifies the primal inner principle of all that belongs to the existence of a thing.[1] But Nature, regarded in its material significance, means not a quality, but the sum-total of all things, in so far as they can be objects of our senses, and therefore of experience; in short, the totality of all phenomena—the sense-world, exclusive of all non-sensuous objects. Now Nature, in this sense of the word, has two main divisions, in accordance with the main distinction of our sensibility, one of which comprises the objects of the outer, the other the object of the inner sense; thus rendering possible a two-fold doctrine of Nature, the doctrine of body and the doctrine of soul, the first dealing with extended, and the second with thinking, Nature.
Every doctrine constituting a system, namely, a whole of cognition, is termed a science; and as its principles may be either axioms of the empirical or rational connection of cognitions in a whole, so natural science, whether it be doctrine of body or doctrine of soul, would have to
- ↑ Essence is the primal inner principle of all that belongs to the possibility of a thing. Hence one can only predicate an essence, but not a nature of geometrical figures (for nothing is contained in their conception expressive of an existence).
