Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/236

Rh CATEGORY Plotinus, after a lengthy critique of Aristotle s categories sets out a twofold list. To ei/, KiV^crts, crracris, rauronys, erepor^s are the primitive categories (irpura. yeV?/) of the intelligible sphere. Oio-ta, TT/SOS TI, TTOLOL, TTOO-OV, /aV^o-is are the categories of the sensible world. The return to the Platonic classification will not escape notice. Modern philosophy, neglecting altogether the dry and tasteless treatment of the Aristotelian doctrine by scholastic writers, gave a new, a wider, and deeper mean ing to the categories. They now appear as ultimate or root notions, the metaphysical or thought elements, which give coherence and consistency to the material of know ledge, the necessary and universal relations which obtain among the particulars of experience. There was thus to some extent a return to Platonism, but in reality, as might easily be shown, the new interpretation was, with due allow ance for difference in point of view, in strict harmony with the true doctrine of Aristotle. The modern theory dates in particular from the time of Kant, who may be said to have re-introduced the term into philosophy. Na turally there are some anticipations in earlier thinkers. The Substance, Attribute, and Mode of Cartesianism can hardly be classed among the categories ; nor does Leibnitz s chance suggestion of a fivefold arrangement into Substance, Quantity, Quality, Action and Passion, and Relations,demand any particular notice. Locke, too, has a classification into Substances, Modes, and Relations, but in it he has manifestly no intention of drawing up a table of categories. What in his system corresponds most nearly to the modern view of these elements is the division of kinds of real predica tion. In all judgments of knowledge we predicate either (1) Identity or Diversity, (2) Relation, (3) Co-existence, or necessary connection, or (4) Real existence. From this the transition was easy to Hume s important classification of philosophical relations into those of Resemblance, Identity, Time and Place, Quantity or Number, Quality, Contrariety, Cause and Effect. These attempts at an exhaustive distribution of the ne cessary relations of all objects of knowledge indicate the direction taken by modern thought, before it received its complete expression from Kant. The doctrine of the categories is the very kernel of the Kantian system, and, through it, of later German philo sophy. To explain it fully would be to write the history of that philosophy. The categories are called by Kant Root-notions of the Understanding (Stammbeyriffe des Verstandes}, and are briefly the specific forms of the a priori or formal element in rational cognition. It is this distinction of matter and form in knowledge that marks off the Kantian from the Aristotelian doctrine. To Kant knowledge was only possible as the synthesis of the mate rial or a posteriori with the formal or a priori. The ma terial to which a priori forms of the understanding were applied was the sensuous content of the pure intuitions, Time and Space. This content could not be known by sense, but only by intellectual function. But the under standing in the process of knowledge makes use of the universal form of synthesis, the judgment; intellectual function is essentially of the nature of judgment or the reduction of a manifold to unity through a conception. The specific or type forms of such function will, therefore, be ex pressed in judgments ; and a complete classification of the forms of judgments is the key by which one may hope to discover the system of categories. Such a list of judgments Kant thought he found in ordinary logic, and from it he drew up his well-known scheme of the twelve categories. These forms are the determinations of all objects of experience, for it is only through them that the manifold of sense can be reduced to the unity of consciousness, and thereby con stituted experience. They are a priori conditions, sub- Judgments. Uuiveisal Particular Singular j Of Quantity Affirmative. . . . Negative Infinite 11. Of Quality Categorical. Hypothetical. Disjunctive... ^ Problematical Assertoric Apodictic III. Of Relation IV. Of Modality jective in one sense, but objective as being universal, ne cessary, and constitutive of experience. The table of logical judgments with corresponding cate gories is as follows : Categories. Unity. Plurality. Totality. Reality. Negation. Li mitation. Inherence and Subsistence (Substance and Accident). Causality and Dependence (Cause and Effect). Community (Reciprocity). Possibility and Impossibility. Existerice-and Non-Existenc;.-. Necessity and Contingency. Kant, it is well-known, criticises Aristotle severely for having drawn up his categories without a principle, arid claims to have disclosed the only possible method by which an exhaustive classification might be obtained. What he criticized in Aristotle is brought against his own procedure by the later German thinkers, particularly Fichte and Hegel. And in point of fact it cannot be denied that Kant has allowed too much completeness to the ordinary logical dis tribution of propositions ; he has given no proof that in these forms are contained all species of synthesis, and in consequence he has failed to show that in the categories, or pure conceptions, are contained all the modes of a priori synthesis. Further, his principle has so far the unity he claimed for it, the unity of a single function, but the specific forms in which such unity manifests itself are not themselves accounted for by this principle. Kant himself hints more than once at the possibility of a completely rational system of the categories, at an evolution from one single movement of thought, and in his Remarks on t/,e Table of the Categories gave a pregnant hint as to the method to be employed. From any complete realization of this suggestion Kant, however, was precluded by one portion of his theory. The categories, although the neces sary conditions under which alone an object of experience can be thrown, are merely forms of the mind s own activity; they apply only to sensuous and consequently subjective material. Outside of and beyond them lies the thing-in- itself, the blankest and emptiest of abstractions, which yet to Kant represented the ultimately real. This subjectivism was a distinct hiatus in the Kantian system, and against it principally Fichte and Hegel directed criticism. It was manifest that at the root of the whole system of categories there lay the synthetizing unity of self-consciousness, and it was upon this unity that Fichte fixed as giving the pos sibility of a more complete and rigorous deduction of the pure notions of the understanding. Without the act of the Ego, whereby it is self-conscious, there could be no knowledge, and this primitive act or function must be, he saw, the position or affirmation of itself by the Ego. The first principle then must be that the Ego posits itself as the Ego, that the Ego = Ego, a principle which is uncondi tioned both in form and matter, and therefore capable of standing absolutely first, of being the prius in a system. Metaphysically regarded this act of self-position yields the categories of Realit) . But, so far as matter is concerned, there cannot be affirmation without negation, omnis dcter- minatio est neyatio. The determination of the Ego pre supposes or involves the Non-Ego. The form of the pro position in which this second act takes to itself expression, the Ego is not = Not-Ego, is unconditioned, not derivable from the first. It is the absolute antithesis to the primitive thesis. The category of Negation is the result of this second act. From these two propositions, involving absolutely op-