Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 2.djvu/100

90 faculty of principles." It is now taught here that all the a priori knowledge hitherto considered, which makes pure mathematics and pure natural science possible, affords only rules, and no principles; because it proceeds from perceptions and forms of knowledge, and not from mere conceptions, which is demanded if it is to be called a principle. Such a principle must accordingly be knowledge from pure conceptions and yet synthetical. But this is absolutely impossible. From pure conceptions nothing but analytical propositions can ever proceed. If conceptions are to be synthetically and yet a priori combined, this combination must necessarily be accomplished by some third thing, through a pure perception of the formal possibility of experience, just as synthetic judgments a posteriori are brought about through empirical perception; consequently a synthetic proposition a priori can never proceed from pure conceptions. In general, however, we are a priori conscious of nothing more than the principle of sufficient reason in its different forms, and therefore no other synthetic judgments a priori are possible than those which proceed from that which receives its content from that principle.

However, Kant finally comes forward with a pretended principle of the reason answering to his demand, yet only with this one, from which others afterwards follow as corollaries. It is the principle which Chr. Wolf set up and explained in his "Cosmologia," sect. i. c. 2, § 93, and in his "Ontologia," § 178. As now above, under the title of the Amphiboly, mere Leibnitzian philosophemes were taken for natural and necessary aberrations of the reason, and were criticised as such, so here precisely the same thing happens with the philosophemes of Wolf. Kant still presents this principle of the reason in an obscure light, through indistinctness, indefiniteness, and breaking of it up (p. 307; V. 361, and 322; V. 379). Clearly expressed, however, it is as follows: "If the conditioned is given, the totality of its conditions must also be given,