Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 2.djvu/68

58 on this account remains always in the province of abstract thought.

To the affirmative and negative Kant adds the infinite judgment, making use of a crotchet of the old scholastics, an ingeniously invented stop-gap, which does not even require to be explained, a blind window, such as many others he made for the sake of his architectonic symmetry.

3. Under the very wide conception of Relation Kant has brought three entirely different properties of judgments, which we must, therefore, examine singly, in order to recognise their origin.

(a.) The hypothetical judgment in general is the abstract expression of that most universal form of all our knowledge, the principle of sufficient reason. In my essay on this principle, I already showed in 1813 that it has four entirely different meanings, and in each of these originally originates in a different faculty of knowledge, and also concerns a different class of ideas. It clearly follows from this, that the source of the hypothetical judgment in general, of that universal form of thought, cannot be, as Kant wishes to make it, merely the understanding and its category of causality; but that the law of causality which, according to my exposition, is the one form of knowledge of the pure understanding, is only one of the forms of that principle which embraces all pure or a priori knowledge – the principle of sufficient reason – which, on the other hand, in each of its meanings has this hypothetical form of judgment as its expression. We see here, however, very distinctly how kinds of knowledge which are quite different in their origin and significance yet appear, if thought in abstracto by the reason, in one and the same form of combination of concepts and judgments, and then in this form can no longer be distinguished, but, in order to distinguish them, we must go back to knowledge of perception, leaving abstract knowledge altogether. Therefore the path which was followed by Kant, starting from the point of view of