772-815, Maimon.
772) Maimon, Salomon: Versuch über die Transscendentalphilosophie, mit einem Anhange über die symbolische Erkenntniss und Anmerkungen. 8vo. Berlin. Voss & Son. pp. xii, 446. (One might well be in doubt, whether to designate Maimon as an opponent or adherent of Kant's. In any case, his philosophizing, which—apart from the more popular essays—is concerned in the main with logic and epistemology, though in the shorter articles Aesthetics, Ethics, and Natural Law are also treated of, shows him to be from first to last dependent upon the Kantian system. Neither by nature nor by his talmudistic education was Maimon endowed with any great gift of productive and systematic thought, though both went towards fitting him for polemic and criticism. His strength lay in the discovery of errors and inconsistencies in the systems of others, in the following up of his adversary even to his last corner of refuge, and in the forcing him to logical surrender. His method developed in him a considerable acuteness, and a most astonishing facility in the finest conceptual analysis,—a facility which often, it must be admitted, leads to worthless artificialisms and mere verbal polemic. Naturally, this manner of philosophizing implies an excess of definitions, distinctions, and divisions, which are frequently arbitrary and not in accordance with general usage, but which, nevertheless, are to be received as the only ones which can give significance to the expressions in question. Maimon never gave an independent exposition of his philosophic views, but in his larger works on philosophy [except, of course, in no. 773] always follows closely the course of Kant in the R. V. He is perpetually making new turns, getting new points of view, finding new paths, for the statement of his agreement with and his divergences from the views of Kant. In many of his works he even employs, for this purpose, two separate and naturally independent trains of thought; so that his writings, when we consider also the conceptual hair-splitting, which has been already mentioned, and the author's difficult and frequently grammatically incorrect style, form the reverse of refreshing reading. No. 772, which Kant recognized in letters to M. Herz and Maimon [cf. no. 76] to be a most acute piece of writing, deviates in some points from the later and final views of its author. He endeavors in it, e.g., to justify the application of the categories to empirical objects by the assumption of differentials of sensible intuitition, similar to the differentials of mathematics and identical with noumena, as rightly understood. The principal differences from Kant, which are common to the work, nos. 772, 773, 775-777, are the following:—
I) Sense and understanding are not two different sources of knowledge, but point further back to consciousness as the final source for both; not, however, to the ideating consciousness of Reinhold, but to consciousness in general, which forms the basis of that as of every other definite consciousness.
