Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/126

94 fact, that Kant either did not clearly recognise in empirical perception the mediation of the causal law—which law is known to us before all experience—or that he intentionally evaded mentioning it, because it did not suit his purpose. In the "Critique of Pure Reason," for instance, the relation between causality and perception is not treated in the "Doctrine of Elements," but in the chapter on the "Paralogisms of Pure Reason," where one would hardly expect to find it; moreover it appears in his "Critique of the Fourth Paralogism of Transcendental Psychology," and only in the first edition. The very fact that this place should have been assigned to it, shows that in considering this relation, he always had the transition from the phenomenon to the thing in itself exclusively in view, but not the genesis of perception itself. Here accordingly he says that the existence of a real external object is not given directly in perception, but can be added to it in thought and thus inferred. In Kant's eyes, however, he who does this is a Transcendental Realist, and consequently on a wrong road. For by his "outward object" Kant here means the thing in itself. The Transcendental Idealist, on the contrary, stops short at the perception of something empirically real—that is, of something existing outside us in Space—without needing the inference of a cause to give it reality. For perception, according to Kant, is quite directly accomplished without any assistance from the causal nexus, and consequently from the Understanding: he simply identifies perception with sensation. This we find confirmed in the passage which begins, "With reference to the reality of external objects, I need as little trust to inference," &c. &c. and again in the sentence commencing with "Now we may well