Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature

26 Ideasfor a Philosophy oINaitto function as sensible things, should ever have come into anybody'shead?'Indeed, if everything that belongs to the presentation of an objectiveworld is eliminated beforehand, what is there left for me to understand?Clearly, only myself So all ideas of an external world wouldhave to develop out of me, myself. For if succession, cause, effect, andthe rest, first attach to things in my representation of them, one can aslittle conceive what those concepts could be without the things, as whatthe things could be without the concepts. Hence the venturesomeexplanation which this system is constrained to give of the origin ofrepresentation. In opposition to things-in-themseives it sets up amind, and this mind contains in itself certain a priori forms, whichhave only this advantage over things-in-themselves, that one can atleast represent them as something absolutely empty. In representingthe things, we apprehend them in these forms. Thereby the formlessobjects acquire structure; the empty forms, content. How it happensthat things come to be represented at all, about that there is thedeepest silence. It is enough that we represent things as external to us.Only in the representation, however, do we first carry space and timeover to them, and further, the concepts of substance and accident,cause and effect, and so on. Thus the succession of our ideas arises inus, and indeed a necessary succession; and this self-made succession,first brought forth in consciousness, is called the course of Nature.This system requires no refutation. To propound it is to overturn itfrom the bottom up. In fact, the Humean scepticism is vastly sirperiorand not at all comparable to it. Hume (faithful to his principles) leavesit altogether undecided whether our ideas correspond to things outsideus or not. In every case, however, he has to assume that thesuccession ofappearances takes place only in our ideas; but that we takejust this particular succession as necessary he declares to be pure illusion.But what one can justly demand of Hume is that he at leastexplain the source of this illusion. For that we do actually think of asequence of causes and effects as necessary - that thereon rest all ourempirical sciences, theory of Nature and history (in which he washimself so great a master), he cannot deny. But whence this illusionitself? Hume answers: "From custom; because hitherto the appearanceshave followed one another in this order, the imagination has accustomeditself to expect the same order also in the future, and this expectationhas, like every long habituation, ultimately become for us a second" The truth is that the idea of things-in-themselves had come down to Kant throughthe tradition and had lost all meaning in the course of inheritance. [This note islacking in the first edition.]Introduction27ure." But this explanation turns in a circle, for the very thing thatto be explained was why things have hitherto followed one another in. order (which Hume does not deny). Was this sequence perhapsething in the things outside us? But apart from our ideas there issuccession. Or, if it was merely the succession of our ideas, then ason for the persistence of this succession must also be given. Whatists independent of me I am unable to explain; but for what goes only in me the reason must be found also in me. Hume can say: It is so,d that satisfies me. But this is not to philosophize. I do not say that ame ought to philosophize, but once a man proclaims that he wants toilosophize, he can no longer dismiss the question, Why?o nothing remains but the attempt to derive the necessity of acession of presentations from the nature of our mind, and so of theite mind as such, and, in order that this succession may be genulyobjective, to have the things themselves, together with this seence,arise and come into being in it.Among all previous systems I know only two - the Spinozistic ande Leibnizian-which not only undertook this attempt, but whosetire philosophy is nothing else but this attempt. Now because therestill at present much doubt and discussion about the relation ofese two systems-whether they contradict each other, or how theyhere-it seems useful to say something about them at the outset.Spinoza, as it seems, was worried at a very early stage about thennection of our ideas with things outside us, and could not toleratee separation which had been set up between them. He saw that ideald real (thought and object) are most intimately united in our nae.That we have ideas of things outside us, that our ideas evench out beyond the things, he could explain to himself only in termsour ideal nature; but that these ideas correspond to actual things, heto explain in terms of the affections and determinations of the idealus. Therefore we could not become aware of the real, save inntrast to the ideal, or of the ideal, save in contrast to the real.cordingly, no separation could occur between the actual things andr ideas of them. Concepts and things, thought and extension, were,r this reason, one and the same for him, both only modifications ofe and the same ideal nature.However, instead ofdescending into.the depths of his self-consciousssand descrying the emergence thence of the two worlds in us - theal and the real- he passed himself by; instead of explaining fromr nature how finite and infinite, originally united in us, proceediprocally from each other, he lost himself forthwith in the idea ofanfinite outside us. In this infinity there arose, or rather originallyre-one knows not whence-affections and modifications, and with