| Our nature is so constituted that intuition with us never can be other than sensuous, that is, it contains only the mode in which we are affected by objects. |
| On the other hand, the faculty of thinking the object of sensuous intuition is the understanding. |
| Neither of these faculties has a preference over the other. |
| Without the sensuous faculty no object would be given to us, and without the understanding no object would be thought. |
| Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without conceptions, blind. |
| Hence it is as necessary for the mind to make its conceptions sensuous (that is, to join to them the object in intuition), as to make its intuitions intelligible (that is, to bring them under conceptions). |
| Neither of these faculties can exchange its proper function. |
| Understanding cannot intuite, and the sensuous faculty cannot think. |
| in no other way than from the united operation of both, can knowledge arise. |
| But no one ought, on this account, to overlook the difference of the elements contributed by each; we have rather great reason carefully to separate and distinguish them. |
| We therefore distinguish the science of the laws of sensibility, that is, aesthetic, from the science of the laws of the understanding, that is, logic. |
| Now, logic in its turn may be considered as twofold--namely, as logic of the general, or of the particular use of the understanding. |
| The first contains the absolutely necessary laws of thought, without which no use whatsoever of the understanding is possible, and gives laws therefore to the understanding, without regard to the difference of objects on which it may be employed. |
| The logic of the particular use of the understanding contains the laws of correct thinking upon a particular class of objects. |
| The former may be called elemental logic--the latter, the organon of this or that particular science. |
| The latter is for the most part employed in the schools, as a propaedeutic to the sciences, although, indeed, according to the course of human reason, it is the last thing we arrive at, when the science has been already matured, and needs only the finishing touches towards its correction and completion; for our knowledge of the objects of our attempted science must be tolerably extensive and complete before we can indicate the laws by which a science of these objects can be established. |
| General logic is again either pure or applied. |
| In the former, we abstract all the empirical conditions under which the understanding is exercised; for example, the influence of the senses, the play of the fantasy or imagination, the laws of the memory, the force of habit, of inclination, etc., consequently also, the sources of prejudice--in a word, we abstract all causes from which particular cognitions arise, because these causes regard the understanding under certain circumstances of its application, and, to the knowledge of them experience is required. |
| Pure general logic has to do, therefore, merely with pure a priori principles, and is a canon of understanding and reason, but only in respect of the formal part of their use, be the content what it may, empirical or transcendental. |
| General logic is called applied, when it is directed to the laws of the use of the understanding, under the subjective empirical conditions which psychology teaches us. |
| It has therefore empirical principles, although, at the same time, it is in so far general, that it applies to the exercise of the understanding, without regard to the difference of objects. |