Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/693

Rh possess an immediate evidence, an evidence independent of experience. This logical independence is closely related to the notion of apriority. We usually speak of apriority of the idea of space when we mean the apriority of the judgments relating to the idea of space. Judgments of connection are confused with judgments of reality. How number, space, and time concepts arise, is a purely psychological question, the answer to which would be a judgment of reality. Mathematical judgments, however, deal not with the laws of occurrence, but with ideas actually possessed by us; they affirm something of the relations and constitution of these ideas. If this is so, then the predications involved in these judgments, as, e.g., that of equality, must be incapable of definition. Helmholtz, however, holds that we can speak of equality only in the physical sense. But if geometry dealt with physical equality, it would be doubtful without empirical proof, whether there is equality at all. How could we, in this case, predicate, as we do, equality of two spaces utterly regardless of the nature of the objects filling them? The notion of the equality of space and time quantities is as indefinable, as, e.g., that of sooner or later. But we also predicate equality in the judgment of reality; what can the empirical sense of such a proposition be when the sense of equality is alleged to be non-empirical? We present reality to ourselves in a space and time order. What sense has this idea? We ourselves and our body belong to the idea which we have of reality. We represent things as acting upon our sense-organs and connect these with our psychical processes. The actual coincidence of these results with what we actually experience, warrants our ideas of what we call objective reality. Our ideas in reference to an objective spatial order are never the immediate expression of our experiences, but strictly considered, only a hypothetical construction. What we call objective reality is not identical with what we perceive. We invariably distinguish objective reality from what perception yields us. Mathematical propositions, then, are independent of experience. Is not epistemology also such an independent science? If the conclusions of critical research affirm anything concerning the manner in which real occurrences, e.g., perception and thought, take place, then epistemology is logically dependent on the facts of experience; but if the critique deals with the establishment of logical relations, it is doubtless logically independent of experience. Critical investigation has for its sole object the discovery of logical relations. Its purpose is reached in the systematic exposition of logical relations, especially the exposition of what is logically independent of the facts of experience. Of course we need a previous insight into psychological facts; they furnish us with the material for judgments of relation. The logical independence of the latter is not therefore surrendered. It is absolutely necessary, however, that epistemology distinguish between real and relative judgments.