Page:A Brief History of Modern Philosophy.djvu/149

 reason in its narrower significance. (In its broader significance understanding and intuition likewise belong to reason.) Those synthetic impulses together with these ideational faculties give rise to the dogmatic systems which deal with the ideas of God (as the absolute being), the soul (as substance) and the world (as absolute totality). Kant attempts to prove, by a very artificial method, that these three are the only ideas: they are to correspond with the three forms of inference of the traditional logic.

b. Objective deduction investigates the right of applying our cognitive forms to given sensations. The fact that we are able to become conscious of the content of our intuitions and concepts does not constitute the problem. Neither does the fact that we can deduce new content from experience constitute a problem. But Kant's problem rather consists in this, namely, the fact that we are able to use our intuitional forms and categories in such a way as to form, with their help, valid judgments which are not found in experience. He expresses it in his own language as follows: How are synthetic judgments a priori possible? By analytical propositions we become aware of the content of our intuitions and reflections; by synthetical propositions a posteriori we include new content derived from experience; but synthetic propositions a priori extend our knowledge independently of our experience. The following are examples of such propositions: every perception has extensive and intensive values, and every event has a cause (or better: every change takes place according to the law of the connection between cause and effect).

According to Kant the validity of such judgments rests upon the fact that experience—in the sense of the fixed and necessary relations of phenomena—is possible only in