Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/190

176 bility by the object. This is what Kant constantly emphasizes as stamping our knowledge with phenomenality. Sensations are subjective affections which nowise express or reveal the nature of the object but only its relation to us. As the sun melts wax (to use an example of Locke's), so the thing produces a certain effect upon my sensibility: I am internally modified in a certain way. But such a modification of my nature, however it may be set up in me by the thing, cannot possibly reveal the nature of the thing as it is in itself. In Kant's own words, we know "only the mode in which our senses are affected by an unknown something" (Werke IV. 63). "Supposing us to carry our empirical perception even to the very highest degree of clearness, we should not thereby advance a step nearer to a knowledge of the constitution of objects as things-in-themselves. For we could only, at best, arrive at a complete cognition of our own mode of perception, that is, of our sensibility " (III. 73). "It is incomprehensible," he explains elsewhere (IV. 31) "how the perception even of a present object should give me a knowledge of that thing as it is in itself, seeing that its properties cannot migrate or wander over (hinüberwandern) into my presentative faculty."

This is further emphasized by the contrast, which Kant again and again recurs to, between our sensuous or receptive intelligence (intellectus ectypus, derivativus) and a creative, or as he otherwise terms it, a perceptive understanding (intellectus archetypus, originarius). The latter, he explains in the celebrated letter to Marcus Herz, must be conceived as all activity or spontaneity; its ideas, therefore, will have creative efficiency. They will not be passively related to foreign objects; they will themselves be the objects, and such a being's knowledge would, of course, be entirely a priori, as the world known would be entirely self-produced. In complete contrast with such an intelligence, we may conceive a being entirely passive or recipient in its relation to the object. In this case, the ideas of the subject would be altogether empirical or a posteriori, due to piecemeal communication from the side of the object. And, as we have already heard Kant say, they would in such a case