Chapter XII: Further Analysis of the Universe

In a previous chapter, some special reference has been made to a little German professor named Immanuel Kant. He was born at Königsberg, in 1724. In 1781 he wrote a book which he called "The Critique of Pure Reason." This provokingly modest title, as already said, covered, in reality, _the analysis of mind and matter, time and space_. It was the most far-reaching piece of purely intellectual work that had ever been given to the world. It has split the heads of hundreds of "philosophers." Certain thinkers have fancied they have thought beyond it, and have supposed it to be laid on the shelf of "deceased philosophy." Meanwhile, we are told, the universities "are returning to the study of Kant." Better still, some of them are even beginning to understand him. Here we shall take him straight, paying no attention to any of the side issues in which he was apt to cover himself up.[56]

Kant, so learned that he was said to "know everything," was completely acquainted with the whole trend of British philosophy, from John Locke to David Hume. He was saturated, too, with the physical sciences. So his first real step in his _Critique of Pure Reason_ was to found himself on the all-inclusive law of scientific idealism. Immanuel Kant did not fool with this law. He did not test it, prove it, and then let it slip out of a loose, greasy mind, as an airy nothing of no practical consequence. He grasped it, and held it, as the bed-rock of all thought and all things. It is a pity he omitted to say so at the very first touch of his work. But he said it clearly enough when he happened to get ready. Thus, for instance:[57]

"In order to prevent any misunderstanding, it will be requisite, in the first place, to recapitulate, as clearly as possible, what our opinion is with respect to _the fundamental nature of our sensuous cognition in general_. We have intended, then, to say that all our intuition is nothing but the re-presentation of phenomena; that the things which we intuite are not in themselves the same as our re-presentations of them in intuition, nor are their relations so constituted as they appear to us; and that _if we take away the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of our senses in general_, then _not only the nature and relations of objects_ in space and time, _but even space and time themselves disappear_.... What may be the nature of objects considered as things in themselves, and without reference to the receptivity of our sensibility, is quite unknown to us."

Again, in closing his dissection of space, Kant said:

"Objects are quite unknown to us in themselves, and _what we call outward objects_ are nothing else but mere _re-presentations of our sensibility_, whose form is space, but whose real correlate, the thing in itself, is not known by means of these representations, nor ever can be, but respecting which, in experience, no inquiry is ever made."

Once more:

"The faculty of sensibility not only does not present us with any indistinct and confused cognition of objects as things in themselves, but, in fact, gives us _no knowledge of these_ at all. On the contrary, as soon as we abstract in thought _our own subjective nature_, the object re-presented, with the properties ascribed to it by sensuous intuition, _entirely disappears, because it was only this subjective nature that determined the form of the object as a phenomenon_."

After awhile, under the maddening caption of "The Possibility of a Conjunction of the Manifold Representations given by Sense,"[58] our German professor virtually crowded his whole work into this one paragraph:

"The manifold content in our re-presentations can be given in an intuition which is merely sensuous--in other words, is nothing but susceptibility; and the form of this intuition can exist _a priori_ in our faculty of representation, without being anything else but the mode in which the subject is affected. But the conjunction (_conjunctio_) of a manifold in intuition never can be given by the senses; it cannot therefore be contained in the pure form of sensuous intuition, for it is a spontaneous act of the faculty of re-presentation. And as we must, to distinguish it from sensibility, entitle this faculty _understanding_, so all conjunction, whether conscious or unconscious, be it of the manifold in intuition, sensuous or non-sensuous, or of several conceptions, is an act of the understanding. To this act we shall give the general appellation of _synthesis_, thereby to indicate, at the same time, that _we cannot represent anything as conjoined in the object without having previously conjoined it ourselves_."

As to comprehend this paragraph is to analyze the universe, let us grapple with it.

Impatient Dr. Sam. Johnson once kicked a stone to refute Berkeley. Let us take that stone, as a clump of matter, and treat it with the head instead of the foot.

"The manifold content in our re-presentations," says Kant, "can be given in an intuition which is merely sensuous." This means simply that the various properties of the "re-presentation" or "intuition" called a stone are "effects on the senses." The color, the texture, the weight, the size--every one of all such "material" attributes--exist, as they are, solely by relation to _me_, or to some other being in whom is organized the element of "sense." Matter is _made_ of impact--impact between its objective background ("the noumenon" or "noumena") and some sort or degree of subjectivity. Without these two terms, their product of interaction, their third term, matter, is _not_. So "the manifold content" of a "re-presentation"--or, what is the same thing, the properties of a material object--are "nothing but susceptibility."

By "the form of intuition," Kant meant, as he has repeatedly explained, the _plural quality_ of space and time. Space is made of _spaces_; time of _times_; and the plural contents (always such) of matter can only exist under the plural contents of space and time--that is, in sections of space and sequences of time, these sections and sequences being the intrinsic character, the divisible quality, the essential "form" of space and time as total units or completed things. And the nature of space and time need not be anything more _objective_ than the nature of matter in general, but can be derived, too, from "the mode in which the subject is affected." "But," says Kant, "_all conjunction_" is "an act of the understanding," and "can not be contained in the pure form of sensuous intuition"; by which he means that time could never be a conjunct of times, space a conjunct of spaces, nor a stone the conjunct of its properties--each a "synthesis" of a "manifold content"--unless made so by the synthetical unity of _a priori_ mind.

Kant attributes "_unconscious_" action to the "_understanding_"--the unconscious action of "conjunction" or "synthesis." His phrase has been a perpetual stumbling-block to his readers, but he meant exactly what he said. Unconscious mental synthesis is what he afterward designated as "the synthesis of _apprehension_."

"By the term _synthesis_ of apprehension [said he], I understand the combination of the manifold in an empirical intuition, whereby perception, that is, empirical consciousness of the intuition (as phenomenon), is possible."

Kant talks of "making the empirical intuition of a house into a perception, by apprehension of the manifold contained therein," and says that "the _necessary unity of space_ and of my _external sensuous intuition_ lies at the foundation of this act." The "manifold" contained in an "empirical intuition"--take the stone we have used for an example--is simply the diversity of "properties," constituting the object--the color, texture, size, weight, and the rest of them; and these properties are "effects of sense." Every one of them is a relation to subjectivity, a result of impact _on_ subjectivity, and is in the _object_ only as reflecting or _re_-presenting there the sensuous nature of a _subject_. But these various "effects on various senses," these merely subjective separates--how do they _get united_ into _one thing_? What constitutes the unity of sensuous manifolds? Every phenomenon being an essential plurality--a lot of "sense-effects"--what closes together the various effects on various human senses, called the properties of a stone, into the one phenomenal object, the stone itself. To this end there must be some common subjective ground of those subjective things, "effects on sense." There must be some subjective unity in which those subjective pluralities all merge, for only as _merged_ do they get to be an _object_. Now, a common subjective ground of various effects on various senses can only be a common _awareness of them_--a _synthetical unity of apprehension_, or just instinctive, automatic consciousness in the germ. This must be common to all the senses together, and to each sense separately. What, for example, is seeing, but the simple awareness of sight? What is touch, but the simple awareness of feeling? What is any "intuition," which means any taking-in of any phenomenon, but a common awareness, however rudimental or developed, of some conjoined diversity of effects on sense?

It must be added here, as vital to the full comprehension of the genesis of matter, that not only every material object, like our example, the stone, is made of essential plurality of sense-effects, but that _every separate property_ of an object is also made of like plurality. No object, and no property of an object, is, or can be, single, unal, or, in other words, _anything_, until constructed so, in sense, by the "unconscious understanding" thereof--the synthetical unity of instinctive, automatic "apprehension." To realize this fact, it is only necessary to remember that every property of anything, say the hardness of a stone, is a compound relation between the impact of some ultimate non-ego on the sense of touch, and the peculiar nature of the sense itself: so the property of hardness must contain _essential diversity_, something from each of _two fundamental sources_. As Aristotle, from his ontological investigations, found that matter, if regarded as an absolute independence--an unrelated thing in itself--is _no thing_, but only chaotic indeterminateness--formless "potentiality"--so Kant, from his psychological inquiry--his dissection of phenomena as existent through perception--found the same truth in deeper significance. The _entire principle of unity_, Whether in a feeling, a thought, a material object, or the universe as a whole, _can only exist through the principle of mind_.

Here is the very bottom of the discoveries of Kant, and the basis, also, of all things.

Mind, then, in its lowest state, is what Kant, "to distinguish it from sensibility," entitled "unconscious understanding." There used to be an old saw in philosophy--still, indeed, at work--to the effect that "there is nothing in the mind that was not first in sense." Leibnitz, adding a piece to the saw, said: "Except mind itself." Leibnitz affirmed, that is, that sense always _contains_ mind--that mind is _in_ sense as a component of it, and that without mind there is no sense at all. What Leibnitz perceived and asserted, Kant _proved_ by "observation and induction"--by analyzing phenomena under the law of scientific idealism. Mind in sense--the mind of sense--is just _automatic animal awareness_, just "simple apprehension," undeveloped, and in the lowest animal life not to be developed, into "apperception," the _conscious_ stage of understanding, capable of forming a _concept_.

Well, in the genesis of a stone, or any other material object, certain effects on sense are merged in the unit they compose, by reception into the "synthetical unity of apprehension." The stone is _created_ in this way. Its own objective unity--its wholeness, or "_form_" as a stone--is thus the derivation, the manufactured product, of _subjectivity as a cosmic element_, an element "_a priori_" to the existence of any possible phenomenon.

The stone, however, _is_ unmistakably objective--is just the palpable thing that everybody takes it to be, out there in space. This is a given _fact of perception_--something, as Kant said, "never questioned in experience." As such _fact_, how can it be accounted for, when we know, at the same time, that the stone is nothing but a plexus of subjective states? How does the bunch of _internal impressions_ get _externalized_? What is the cause of this reflex, this "_re_-presentation"? It must be something inherent in the principle of _apprehension itself_, or the plexus of impressions would necessarily stay within us. Being wrought internally, it would remain internal. Hence, this "apprehension"--this element of instinctive synthetical awareness--must be in its nature a _double_--an entity which reproduces, or throws out before itself, whatever lot of sense-effects it receptively synthesizes, or binds together in a sheaf, known as some object. But all this, summed up, means only that mind, even in its lowest form of "unconscious understanding"--the simple automatic apprehension which shuts together certain effects on sense into a totality of them--must, _as being apprehension_, necessarily, though instinctively, apprehended its own product. Here is the full explanation of the amusing, iron-clad conception of Hobbes, that an "image," or a "color," is but an apparition unto us of "motion, agitation, or alteration" in some "internal substance of the head."

The self-reflexiveness of "apprehension" is precisely the same thing, _in germ_, that the self-reflexiveness of "apperception" is, in _full self-consciousness_.

The self-reflexiveness of apprehension, in the manufacture of phenomena, was named by Kant "_the transcendental synthesis of imagination_"--the word "imagination" standing on its roots, and meaning _the image-making faculty_. Phenomena, as reflex-conjuncts of sense-effects, are "produced"--put out--by this second function of apprehension; so Kant said he sometimes called it "productive imagination." It is that function of pure elemental, or _a priori_ awareness, which "_re_-presents" itself in the constitution of every object, as its _unity_, but a unity _shaped_ according to some object's filling of senses-effects. Hence Kant says:

"This synthesis of the manifold of sensuous intuition, which is possible and necessary _a priori_, may be called figurative synthesis (_synthesis speciosa_)."

Thus Kant found mind in sense, "unconscious understanding," the instinctive awareness of animal susceptibility, as it existed in himself, to be the literal objective basis of all phenomena--the first "material" unity of every "material thing." And he found this elemental source of all unity to be an innate self-activity--a self-seeing mirror, as it were--a double of receptiveness and reflectiveness. Here, at last, was the actual, _living thing_, of which Locke's "blank-tablet" had long been the still-born, stone figure.

Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his remarkable investigation of "The Principles of Psychology," posits "mind" as always implied in sentiency, and as necessary to the genesis of any phenomenon, even the "first nervous shock" of a sensitive being. Recognizing the law of scientific idealism, he has seen, too, that our objective world is made up, at the perceptional outset, of such shocks. Again, he has proved, with great detail, that the action of mind is always of one general nature, whether in the lowest animal instinct or the highest conscious reason. But back at the first nervous shock, Mr. Spencer _stops_ with mind, and says that at the next regress it becomes "unknowable." Yet nearly a hundred years before this investigation Kant showed precisely what this so-called "unknowable" _is_. He showed that mind, in all stages and states--mind in itself--is a synthetical unity of awareness. In germ, as "unconscious understanding"--as the mind of sense--its function is to be simply apprehensive of, and thus to conjoin in its instinctive cognizance, some "manifold" contained in a "nervous shock," or in various sense-effects, into some _unity_; which then, as _itself apprehended_, or _made a reflex_, becomes an impression, an image, an object.