Page:Kant's Prolegomena etc (1883).djvu/263

 only so much science proper is to be met with therein as there is cognition à priori, a doctrine of nature can only contain so much science proper as there is in it of applied mathematics.

So long, therefore as no conception is discovered for the chemical effects of substances on one another, which admits of being constructed, that is, no law of the approach or retreat of the parts can be stated in accordance with which (as, for instance, in proportion to their densities) their motions, together with the consequences of these, can be intuited and presented à priori (a demand that will scarcely ever be fulfilled), chemistry will be nothing more than a systematic art or experimental doctrine, but never science proper, its principles being merely empirical and not admitting of any presentation à priori; as a consequence, the principles of chemical phenomena cannot make their possibility in the least degree conceivable, being incapable of the application of mathematics.

But still farther even than chemistry must empirical psychology be removed from the rank of what may be termed a natural science proper; firstly, because mathematics is inapplicable to the phenomena of the internal sense and its laws, unless indeed we consider merely the law of permanence in the flow of its internal changes; but this would be an extension of cognition, bearing much the same relation to that procured by the mathematics of corporeal knowledge, as the doctrine of the properties of the straight line does to the whole of geometry; for the pure internal intuition in which psychical phenomena are constructed is time, which has only one dimension. But not even as a systematic art of analysis, or experimental doctrine, can it ever approach chemistry, because in it the manifold of internal observation is only separated in thought, but cannot be kept separate and be connected again at pleasure; still less is another thinking subject amenable to investigations of this kind, and even the observation itself, alters and distorts the state of the object observed. It can never therefore be anything more than an historical, and as such, as far as possible systematic natural doctrine of the internal sense, i.e. a natural description of the soul, but not a science of the soul, nor