Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/396

 374 KANT. (i) The Paralogisms of Rational Psychology. The trans- cendental self-consciousness or pure ego which accompanies and connects all my representations, the subject of all judg- ments which I form, is, as the Analytic recognized, tlic_pre- supposition of all knowing (pp. 358-359), but as such it can never become an object of knowledge. We-must not make a given object out of the subject which never can be a predi- cate, nor substitute a real thinking substance for the logical subject of thought, nor revamp the unity of self-conscious- ness into the simplicity and identical personality of theiji soul. The rational psychology of the Wolffian school is guilty of this error, and whatever of proof it advances for the substantiality, simplicity, and personality of the soul, and, by way of deduction, for its immateriality and immor- tality as well as for its relation to the body, is based upon this substitution, this ambiguity of the middle term, and therefore upon a quaternio terrninorum, — all its conclu- sions are fallacious. It is allowable and unavoidable to add in thought an absolute subject, the unity of the ego, to inner phenomena;* it is inadmissible to treat the Idea of the soul as a knowable thing. In order to be able to apply the category of substance to it, we would have to lay hold of a permanent in intuition such as cannot be found in the inner sense. Empirical psychology, then, alone remains for the extension of our knowledge of mental life, while rational psychology shrivels up from a doctrine into a mere disci- pline, which watches that the limits of experience are not overstepped. But even as a mere limiting determination it has great value. For, along with the hope of proving the immateriality and immortality of the soul, the fear of see- ing them disproved is also dissipated ; materialism is just as unfounded as spiritualism, and if the conclusions of the latter concerning the soul as a simple, immaterial substance which survives the death of the body, cannot be proved, yet f; not signify an actual being, but only expresses certain principles of systematic unity in the explanation of psychical phenomena, viz. , " To regard all determi- nations as existing in one subject, all powers, as far as possible, as derived from one fundamental power, all change as belonging to the states of one and the same permanent being, and to represent all phenomena in space as totally dis- tinct from acts of thought." 1--
 * The rational concept of the soul as a simple, independent intelligence does