Bearing then this in mind, that intelligence is a self-development, not a quality supervening to a substance, we may abstract from all degree, and for the purpose of philosophic construction reduce it to kind, under the idea of an indestructible power with two opposite and counteracting forces, which, by a metaphor borrowed from astronomy, we may call the centrifugal and centripetal forces. The intelligence in the one tends to objectize itself, and in the other to know itself in the object. It will be hereafter my business to construct by a series of intuitions the progressive schemes, that must follow from such a power with such forces, till I arrive at the fulness of the human intelligence. For my present purpose, I assume such a power as my principle, in order to deduce from it a faculty, the generation, agency, and application of which form the contents of the ensuing chapter.

In a preceding page I have justified the use of technical terms in philosophy, whenever they tend to preclude confusion of thought, and when they assist the memory by the exclusive singleness of their meaning more than they may, for a short time, bewilder the attention by their strangeness. I trust that I have not extended this privilege beyond the grounds on which I have claimed it, namely, the conveniency of the scholastic phrase to distinguish the kind from all degrees, or rather to express the kind with the abstraction of degrees as, for instance, multeity instead of multitude; or, secondly, for the sake of correspondence in sound in interdependent or antithetical terms, as subject and object; or, lastly, to avoid the wearying recurrence of circumlocutions and definitions. Thus, I shall venture to use potence, in order to express a specific degree of a power, in imitation of the Algebraists. I have even hazarded the new verb potenziate, with its derivatives, in order to express the combination or transfer of powers. It is with new or unusual terms, as with privileges in courts of justice or legislature; there can be no legitimate privilege where there already exists a positive law adequate to the purpose; and, when there is no law in existence, the privilege is to be justified by its accordance with the end, or final cause, of all law. Unusual and new-coined words are, doubtless, an evil; but vagueness, confusion, and imperfect convey

ance of our thoughts, are a far greater. Every system, which is under the necessity of using terms not familiarized by the metaphysics in fashion, will be described as written in an unintelligible style, and the author must expect the charge of having substituted learned jargon for clear conception; while, according to the creed of our modern philosophers, nothing is deemed a clear conception but what is representable by a distinct image. Thus the conceivable is reduced within the bounds of the picturable. Hinc patet, qui fiat, ut cum irrepræsentabile et impossibile vulgo ejusdem significatus habeantur, conceptus tam continui, quam infiniti, a plurimis rejiciantur, quippe quorum, secundum leges cognitionis intuitira, representatio est impossibilis. Quanquam autem harum e non paucis scholis explosarum notionum, presertim prioris, causam hic non gero, maximi tamen momenti erit monuisse: gravissimo illos errore labi, qui tam perversa argumentandi ratione utuntur. Quicquid enim repugnat legibus intellectus et rationis, utique est impossibile; quod autem, cum rationis puræ sit objectum, legibus cognitionis intuitivæ tantummodo non subest, non item. Nam hic dissensus inter facultatem sensitivam et intellectualem (quarum indolem mox exponam), nihil indigitat, nisi, quas mens ab intellectu acceptas fert ideas abstractas, illas in concreto exsequi et in intuitus commutare sæpenumero non posse. Hæc autem reluctantia subjectiva mentitur, ut plurimum, repugnantiam aliquam objectivam, et incautos facile fallit, limitibus, quibus mens humana circumscribitur, pro iis habitis, quibus ipsa rerum essentia continetur.35

35 TRANSLATION.

"Hence it is clear, from what cause many reject the notion of the continuous and the infinite. They take, namely, the words irrepresentable and impossible in one and the same meaning; and, according to the forms of sensuous evidence, the notion of the continuous and the infinite is doubtless impossible. I am not now pleading the cause of these laws, which not a few schools have thought proper to explode, especially the former (the law of continuity). But it is of the highest importance to admonish the reader, that those, who adopt so perverted a mode of reasoning, are under a grievous error. Whatever opposes the formal principles of the understanding and the reason is confessedly impossible; but not therefore that, which is therefore not amenable to the forms of sensuous evidence, because it is exclusively an object of pure intellect. For this non-coinci

Critics," who are most ready to bring this charge of pedantry and unintelligibility, are the most apt to overlook the important fact, that, besides the language of words, there is a language of spirits (sermo interior)—and that the former is only the vehicle of the latter. Consequently, their assurance, that they do not understand the philosophic writer, instead of proving anything against the philosophy, may furnish an equal, and (cæteris paribus) even a stronger presumption against their own philosophic talent.

Great, indeed, are the obstacles which an English metaphysician has to encounter. Amongst his most respectable and intelligent judges, there will be many who have devoted their attention exclusively to the concerns and interests of human life, and who bring with them to the perusal of a philosophic system an habitual aversion to all speculations, the utility and application of which are not evident and immediate. To these I would, in the first instance, merely oppose an authority, which they themselves hold venerable, that of Lord Bacon-non inutiles Scientiæ

dence of the sensuous and the intellectual (the nature of which I shall presently lay open) proves nothing more, but that the mind cannot always adequately represent in the concrete, and transform into distinct images, abstract notions derived from the pure intellect. But this contradiction, which is, in itself, merely subjective (i. e. an incapacity in the nature of man), too often passes for an incongruity or impossibility in the object (i. e. the notions themselves), and seduces the incautious to mistake the limitations of the human faculties for the limits of things, as they really exist."

I take this occasion to observe, that here and elsewhere Kant uses the term intuition, and the verb active (intueri Germanice anschauen) for which we have unfortunately no correspondent word, exclusively for that which can be represented in space and time. He therefore consistently and rightly denies the possibility of intellectual intuitions. But as I see no adequate reason for this exclusive sense of the term, I have reverted to its wider signification, authorized by our elder theologians and metaphysicians, according to whom the term comprehends all truths known to us without a medium.

From Kant's Treatise De mundi sensibilis et intelligibilis forma et principiis, 1770. [(Sect. I., § 1. Works, vol. III, pp. 126-7.) S. C.]

36 [This paragraph and the second sentence of the following are nearly the same as some sentences that occur in Abhandlungen, Phil. Schrift., pp. 203-4.]

existimandæ sunt, quarum in se nullus est usus, si ingenia acuant et ordinent.37

There are others whose prejudices are still more formidable, inasmuch as they are grounded in their moral feelings and religious principles, which had been alarmed and shocked by the impious and pernicious tenets, defended by Hume, Priestley, and the French fatalists or necessitarians; some of whom had perverted metaphysical reasonings to the denial of the mysteries, and, indeed, of all the peculiar doctrines of Christianity; and others even to the subversion of all distinction between right and wrong. I would request such men to consider what an eminent and successful defender of the Christian faith has observed, that true metaphysics are nothing else but true divinity, and that, in fact, the writers, who have given them such just offence, were sophists, who had taken advantage of the general neglect into which the science of logic had unhappily fallen, rather than metaphysicians, a name, indeed, which those writers were the first to explode as unmeaning. Secondly, I would remind them, that as long as there are men in the world to whom the Tv CEAUTÓ is an instinct and a command from their own nature, so long will there be metaphysicians and metaphysical speculations; that false metaphysics can be effectually counteracted by true metaphysics alone; and that, if the reasoning be clear, solid, and pertinent, the truth deduced can never be the less valuable on account of the depth from which it may have been drawn.

A third class profess themselves friendly to metaphysics, and believe that they are themselves metaphysicians. They have no objection to system or terminology, provided it be the method and the nomenclature to which they have been familiarized in the writings of Locke, Hume, Hartley, Condillac," or perhaps Dr. Reid, and Professor Stewart. To objections from this

39

40

37 [De Augment. Scient., vi., c. 3. S. C.] 38 [Appendix Q.]

39 [Appendix R.]

40 [Schelling also says (in Abhandlungen Phil. Schrift., p. 204) "Others were not prejudiced against nomenclature, terminology,-the spirit of system in general,—but only against this nomenclature" namely that of Kant; which he attributes to their having been long accustomed to the statements of Leibnitz, who had communicated his philosophical

cause, it is a sufficient answer, that one main object of my attempt was to demonstrate the vagueness or insufficiency of the terms used in the metaphysical schools of France and Great Britain since the revolution, and that the errors which I propose to attack cannot subsist, except as they are concealed behind the mask of a plausible and indefinite nomenclature.

But the worst and widest impediment still remains. It is the predominance of a popular philosophy, at once the counterfeit and the mortal enemy of all true and manly metaphysical research. It is that corruption, introduced by certain immethodical aphorisming eclectics," who, dismissing not only all system, but all logical connexion, pick and choose whatever is most plausible and showy; who select whatever words can have some semblance of sense attached to them without the least expenditure of thought; in short, whatever may enable men to talk of what they do not understand, with a careful avoidance of everything that might awaken them to a moment's suspicion of their ignorance. This, alas! is an irremediable disease, for it brings with it not so much an indisposition to any particular system, but an utter loss of taste and faculty for all system and for all philosophy. Like echoes that beget each other amongst the mountains, the praise or blame of such men rolls in volleys long after the report from the original blunderbuss. Sequacitas est potius et coitio quam consensus: et tamen (quod pessimum est) pusillanimitas ista non sine arrogantia et fastidio se offert.“2

I shall now proceed to the nature and genesis of the Imagination; but I must first take leave to notice, that after a more

principles fragmentarily, in letters to friends, or to distinguished and great Lords, ever with much forbearance towards prevailing opinions, and on that account with less of sharpness and precision than is suitable to scientific explanation; or to their having grown stiff in the school-language and method of Wolf. S C.]

41 ["Finally, the last of all, through the impotent sham philosophy of some waterish authors, or the pandect wisdom of aphoristic eclectics, had lost all sense and taste, not perhaps for a determined system, but for philosophy in general, before Kant had published a syllable of his philosophy." Transl. (Abhandlungen Phil. Schrift., p. 204.) S. C.]

42 Franc. Baconis de Verulam, NOVUM ORGANUM. [Aphorisms lxxvii. and lxxxviii. S. C.]