Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 2.djvu/92

82 to ideas of perception. But yet he arrives at no distinction; and although Locke and Leibnitz really committed these errors, Kant himself is burdened with a third error which includes them both – the error of having so mixed up knowledge of perception and abstract knowledge that a monstrous hybrid of the two resulted, a chimera of which no distinct idea is possible, and which therefore necessarily only confused and stupefied students, and set them at variance.

Certainly thought and perception are separated more in the chapter referred to "On the Division of all Objects into Phenomena and Noumena" than anywhere else, but the nature of this distinction is here a fundamentally false one. On p. 253; V. 309, it is said: "If I take away all thought (through the categories) from empirical knowledge, there remains absolutely no knowledge of an object, for through mere perception nothing at all is thought, and that this affection of sensibility is in me establishes really no relation of such ideas to any object." This sentence contains, in some degree, all the errors of Kant in a nutshell; for it brings out clearly that he has falsely conceived the relation between sensation, perception, and thought, and accordingly identifies the perception, whose form he yet supposes to be space, and indeed space in all its three dimensions, with the mere subjective sensation in the organs of sense, but only allows the knowledge of an object to be given through thought, which is different from perception. I, on the contrary, say: Objects are first of all objects of perception, not of thought, and all knowledge of objects is originally and in itself perception. Perception, however, is by no means mere sensation, but the understanding is already active in it. The thought, which is added only in the case of men, not in the case of the brutes, is mere abstraction from perception, gives no fundamentally new knowledge, does not itself establish objects which were not before, but merely changes the form of the knowledge already won through perception,