Page:Goethe and Schiller's Xenions (IA goetheschillersx00goetiala).pdf/188

 involving the principles of theory or systematic abstract thought.

Page 120, Note 18.—Here the term "natural law" does not mean laws of nature but the juridical principle based upon primitive natural conditions.

Page 121, Note 19.—Samuel von Puffendorf (1632-1694) was a famous jurist and professor of natural law in Berlin. (See previous note.)

Pages 122 and 123, Note 20.—Kant declared that the man who performed his duty because it gave him pleasure was less moral than he who did it against his own inclinations.

Page 124, Note 21.—Schiller was a disciple and follower of Kant, who finds the conditions of knowledge in the thinking subject, not in the object that is thought. Since a thinking being does not acquire an insight into the laws of form by experience, but establishes them a priori, Kant believes that things have to conform to cognition and not cognition to things. Man thus produces truth out of his own being, and imports it into the objective world. Now it is true that truth and the criterion of truth, namely reason, develop together with mind; for indeed reason is the characteristic feature of mind. Things are real, not true, and truth can dwell in mental representations only. But considering the fact that mind develops from and by experience which originates by a contact with objects, and that reason is but the formal element extracted from experience