Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/355

 THE MAIN AND SUBORDINATE QUESTIONS. ZZZ thinking, it must also be remembered that synthesis is everywhere preceded by a mighty work of analysis, and that this still exerts its power even after the adjustment is complete. Thus Kant became the energetic defender of a qualitative view of the world in opposition to the quan- titative view of Leibnitz, for which antitheses {e. g., sensa- tion and thought, feeling and cognition, good and evil, duty and inclination) fade into mere differences of degree. In the beginning of this chapter we have indicated how the new ideal of knowledge, under whose banner Kant brought about a reform of philosophy, grew out of the conflict between the rationalistic (dogmatic) and theV empirical (skeptical) systems., This combines the Baconian ideal of the extension of knowledge with the Cartesian ideal of certainty in knowledge. It is synthetic judgments ? alone which extend knowledge, while analytic judgments are explicative merely.* A priori judgments alone are'Ti perfectly certain, absolutely universal, and necessarily '" valid; while a posteriori Indgmants are subjectively valid merely, lack necessity, and, at best, yield only relative universality. f All analytic judgments are a priori, all y / empirical or a posteriori indgmc^nts, are synthetic. Between" the two lies the object of Kant's search. Do. ..synthetic judgme nts a prior ijsxist, and how are they possible? Two sciences discuss the /lozv, and a third the // of weight," a synthetic judgment. The former explicates the concept of the sub- ject by bringing into notice an idea already contained in it and belonging to the definition as a part thereof ; it is based on the law of contradiction : an un- extended body is a self-contradictory concept. The latter, on the contrary, goes beyond the concept of the subject and adds a predicate which had not been thought therein. It is experience which teaches us that weight is joined to matter, a fact which cannot be derived from the concept of matter. Almost all mathematical principles are synthetic, and here, as will be shown, it is not experience but "pure intuition" which permits us to go beyond the concept and add a new mark to it. f The Scholastics applied the term a priori to knowledge from causes (from that which precedes), ^wA a posteriori to knowledge from effects. Kant, fol- lowing Leibnitz and Lambert, uses the terms to designate the antithesis, knowl- edge from reason and knowledge from experience. An a priori judgment is a judgment obtained without the aid of experience. When the principle from which it is derived is also independent of experience it is absolutelj a priori, otherwise it is relatively a priori.
 * " All bodies are extended " is an analytic judgment ; "all bodies possess