Page:A Brief History of Modern Philosophy.djvu/148

 of the understanding (categories). He says the function of the understanding is judgment; every judgment consists of a combination of concepts. There must therefore be as many different categories as there are kinds of judgments!—He thus discovers, on the basis of the traditional logic (of course somewhat modified by himself), twelve categories, neither more nor less. This was certainly a profound illusion. For the customary classification of judgments is logically untenable, it is at least impossible to justify the inference from them to different kinds of fundamental categories.

Kant divides the twelve categories, which we will not here repeat, into two classes: mathematical and dynamic; the concept of magnitude and the concept of causality might be regarded as representative of these two classes. All our judgments express either a relation of magnitude (greater or less) or a relation of real dependence (cause and effect). The concept of continuity is common to both relations: all magnitudes arise continuously from smaller magnitudes, and cause passes continuously into effect.

We have thus far discovered two groups of forms: the forms of intuition and of the categories. But there is still a third group. We are not satisfied with simply arranging sensations in space and time, and afterwards arranging the intuitional forms which have thus arisen according to their relations of magnitude and cause. The synthetic impulse, the combining activity, is so deeply imbedded in our nature that we are constantly in search of higher unities and totalities and finally demand an absolute completion of the synthesis. This is the sphere of ideas, the forms, in which man attempts to conceive absolute unities and totalities. Kant calls the ideational faculty