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Cliquer sur les phrases pour les voir dans leur contexte. Les textes de Immanuel Kant et David Hume sont disponibles auprès du Projet Gutenberg.

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Now we have already observd, that however philosophers may distinguish betwixt the objects and perceptions of the senses; which they suppose co-existent and resembling; yet this is a distinction, which is not comprehended by the generality of mankind, who as they perceive only one being, can never assent to the opinion of a double existence and representation.

 To make this evident, let us [Part II, SECT. 6.] remember, that as every idea is derived from a preceding perception, it is impossible our idea of a perception, and that of an object or external existence can ever represent what are specifically different from each other. But if we proceed analytically--the "I think" as a proposition containing in itself an existence as given, consequently modality being the principle--and dissect this proposition, in order to ascertain its content, and discover whether and how this Ego determines its existence in time and space without the aid of anything external; the propositions of rationalistic psychology would not begin with the conception of a thinking being, but with a reality, and the properties of a thinking being in general would be deduced from the mode in which this reality is cogitated, after everything empirical had been abstracted; as is shown in the following table: The minor contains an experience, the major reasons from a general experience to the existence of a necessary being.* Thus this argument really begins at experience, and is not completely a priori, or ontological. It follows that in objects of perception, that is, in phenomena, there must be found a substratum which represents time in general, and in which all change or coexistence can be perceived by means of the relation of phenomena to it. In relation to the present problem, therefore, the regulative principle of reason is that everything in the sensuous world possesses an empirically conditioned existence--that no property of the sensuous world possesses unconditioned necessity--that we are bound to expect, and, so far as is possible, to seek for the empirical condition of every member in the series of conditions--and that there is no sufficient reason to justify us in deducing any existence from a condition which lies out of and beyond the empirical series, or in regarding any existence as independent and self-subsistent; although this should not prevent us from recognizing the possibility of the whole series being based upon a being which is intelligible, and for this reason free from all empirical conditions. The proposition, "I think," is, in the present case, understood in a problematical sense, not in so far as it contains a perception of an existence (like the Cartesian "Cogito, ergo sum"),[Footnote; "I think, therefore I am."] but in regard to its mere possibility--for the purpose of discovering what properties may be inferred from so simple a proposition and predicated of the subject of it. If with the intellectual consciousness of my existence, in the representation; I am, which accompanies all my judgements, and all the operations of my understanding, I could, at the same time, connect a determination of my existence by intellectual intuition, then the consciousness of a relation to something external to me would not be necessary.