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Rh ). Of these the first gives laws to the faculty of cognition or to nature, the second laws to taste, and the third laws to the will.

The most important of the fundamental assumptions concerns the relation, the nature, and the mission of the two faculties of cognition. These do not differ in degree, through the possession of greater or less distinctness—for there are sensuous representations which are distinct and intellectual ones which are not so—but specifically: Sensibility is the faculty of intuitions, understanding the faculty of concepts. Intuitions are particular, concepts general representations. The former relate to objects directly, the latter only indirectly (through the mediation of other representations). In intuition the mind is receptive, in conception it acts spontaneously. "Through intuitions objects are given to us; through concepts they are thought." It results from this that neither of the two faculties is of itself sufficient for the attainment of knowledge, for cognition is objective thinking, the determination of objects, the unifying combination or elaboration of a given manifold, the forming of a material content. Rationalists and empiricists alike have been deceived in regard to the necessity for co-operation between the senses and the understanding. Sensibility furnishes the material manifold, which of itself it is not able to form, while the understanding gives the unifying form, to which of itself it cannot furnish a content. "Intuitions without concepts are blind" (formless, unintelligible), "concepts without intuitions are empty" (without content). In the one case, form and order are wanting, in the other, the material to be formed. The two faculties are thrown back on each other, and knowledge can arise only from their union.

A certain degree of form is attained in sense, it is true, since the chaos of sensations is ordered under the "forms of intuition," space and time, which are an original possession of the intuiting subject, but this is not sufficient, without the aid of the understanding, for the genesis of knowledge. In view of the a priori nature of space and time, though without detraction from their intuitive character (they are immediate particular representations), we may assign