THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

KANT AND GERMAN IDEALISM
i. TRANSCENDENTAL ESTHETIC
The effort to answer this question, to study the inherent structure of the
mind, or the innate laws of thought,
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is what Kant calls "transcendental
philosophy," because it is a problem transcending sense-experience. "I
all knowledge transcendental which is occupied not so much with
objects, as with our a priori concepts of objects." 10 with our modes of
correlating our experience into knowledge. There are two grades or
stages in this process of working up the raw material of sensation into the
finished product of thought. The first stage is the coordination of sensa-
tions by applying to them the forms of perception space and time; the
second stage is the coordination of the perceptions so developed, by
applying to them the forms of conception the "categories" of thought.
Kant, using the word esthetic in its original and etymological sense, as
connoting sensation or feeling, calls the study of the first of these stages
"Transcendental Esthetic"; and using the word logic as meaning the
science of the forms of thought, he calls the study of the second stage
"Transcendental Logic." These are terrible words, which will take mean-
ing as the argument proceeds; once over this hill, the road to Kant will
be comparatively clear.
Now just what is meant by sensations and perceptions? and how does
the mind change the former into the latter? By itself a sensation is merely
the awareness of a stimulus; we have a taste on the tongue, an odor in
the nostrils, a sound in the ears, a temperature on the skin, a flash of light
on the retina, a pressure on the fingers: it is the raw crude beginning of
experience; it is what the infant has in the early days of its groping
mental life; it is not yet knowledge. But let these various sensations group
themselves about an object in space and time say this apple; let the
odor in the nostrils, and the taste on the tongue, the light on the retina,
the shape-revealing pressure on the fingers and the hand, unite and
group themselves about this : "thing" and there is now an awareness not
so much of a stimulus as of a specific object; there is a perception. Sensa-
tion has passed into knowledge.
But again, was this passage, this grouping, automatic? Did the sensations
of themselves, spontaneously and naturally, fall into a cluster and
an order, and so become perception? Yes, said Locke and Hume; not at
all, says Kant.
For these varied sensations come to us through varied channels of
sense, through a thousand "afferent nerves" that pass from skin and eye
and ear and tongue into the brain; what a medley of messengers they
must be as they crowd into the chambers of the mind, calling for atten-
tion! No wonder Plato spoke of "the rabble of the senses." And left to
**Critiaue of Pure Reason, p. i