H. A. Prichard

“ Without consciousness that what we are thinking is identical with what we thought a moment ago, all reproduction in the series of representations would be in vain. For what we are thinking would be a new representation at the present moment, which did not at all belong to the act by which it was bound to have been gradually produced, and the manifold of the same would never constitute a whole, as lacking the unity which only consciousness can give it. ”

“ If we fail to scrutinise the meaning of the terms "end" and "purpose," we are apt to assume uncritically that all deliberate action, i.e., action proper, must have a purpose; we then become puzzled both when we look for the purpose of an action done from a sense of obligation, and also when we try to apply to such an action the distinction of means and end, the truth all the time being that since there is no end, there is no means either. ”

“ It is simply impossible to think that any reality depends upon our knowledge of it, or upon any knowledge of it. If there is to be knowledge, there must first be something to be known. In other words, knowledge is essentially discovery, or the finding of what already is. If a reality could only be or come to be in virtue of some activity or process on the part of the mind, that activity or process would not be 'knowing', but 'making' or 'creating', and to make and to know must in the end be admitted to be mutually exclusive. ”

“ But if this answer be no answer, what other can be offered? Only, it seems an answer which bases the obligation to do something on the goodness either of something to which the act leads of the act itself. Suppose, when wondering whether we really ought to act in the ways usually called moral, we are told as a means of resolving our doubt that those acts are right which produce happiness. We at once ask "Whose happiness?" If we are told "Our own happiness," then, though we shall lose our hesitation to act in these ways, we shall not recover our sense that we ought to do so. ”

“ They undoubtedly think that their judgements apply to things as they are in themselves, and not merely as they appear to us. They certainly do not think that the relations which they discover apply to objects only as perceived. Not only, therefore, do they not think that bodies in space are phenomena, but they do not even leave it an open question whether bodies are phenomena or not. Hence, if Kant be right, they are really in a state of illusion, for on his view the true geometrical judgement should include in itself the phenomenal character of spatial relations ”

“ If the motive in respect of which we think an action good is the sense of obligation, then so far from the sense that we ought to do it being derived from our apprehension of its goodness, our apprehension of its goodness will presuppose the sense that we ought to do it. In other words, in this case the recognition that the act is good will plainly presuppose the recognition that the act is right, whereas the view under consideration is that the recognition of the goodness of the act gives rise to the recognition of its rightness. ”

“ Objects in space and time are only phenomena, and, as such, are actual only in perception. When we say that a past event, or that a body which we do not perceive, is real, we merely assert the possibility of a 'perception'. "All events from time immemorial prior to my existence mean nothing else than the possibility of prolonging the chain of experience from the present perception upwards to the conditions which determine this perception according to time." ”

“ Unless we thought knowledge a good thing, it may be urged, we should not think that we ought to tell the truth; unless we thought pain a bad thing, we should not think the infliction of it, without special reason, wrong. But this is not to imply that the badness of error is the reason why it is wrong to lie, or the badness of pain the reason why we ought not to inflict it without special cause2. ”

“ It is no more surprising that the laws of the phenomena in nature must agree with the understanding and with its a priori form, that is, its faculty of connecting the manifold in general, than that the phenomena themselves must agree with the a priori form of our sensuous perception. For laws exist in the phenomena as little as phenomena exist in themselves; on the contrary, laws exist only relatively to the subject in which the phenomena inhere, so far as it has understanding, just as phenomena exist only relatively to the subject, so far as it has senses. ”

“ It will probably be urged that on this view our various obligations form, like Aristotle's categories, an unrelated chaos in which it is impossible to acquiesce. For, according to it, the obligation to repay a benefit, or to pay a debt, or to keep a promise, presupposes a previous act of another; whereas the obligation to speak the truth or not to harm another does not; and, again, the obligation to remove our timidity involves no relations to others at all. ”

“ How is it that we know, when, as we say, we see a boat going down stream, that there is a succession in what we perceive, and not merely a succession in our perception of it, as is the case when, as we say, we see the parts of a house? Hume, according to Kant, cannot answer this question; he has only the right to say that in all cases we have a succession of perceptions; for in reality an answer to the question will show that the acquisition of this knowledge involves an appeal to the principle of causality. ”

“ No doubt, our unreflective knowledge of the nature of perspective enables us to allow for the effect of perspective, and to ascertain the real shape of a solid object from what it looks when seen from different points. In fact, the habit of allowing for the effect of perspective is so thoroughly ingrained in human beings that the child is not aware that he is making this allowance, but thinks that he draws the side of the house as he sees it. ”

“ Even if it be difficult in certain cases, as in that of colour, to decide whether something belongs to our act of perception or not, we never suppose that it can be both a form of perception and a characteristic of the reality perceived. We think that if it be the one, it cannot be the other.
Moreover, if we pass from perception to knowledge or thought—which in this context may be treated as identical—and seek to illustrate a form of knowledge or of thought, we may cite the distinction of logical subject and logical predicate of a judgement. ”

“ Hence, we can only decide that a particular reality depends upon the mind by appeal to its special character. We cannot treat it simply as a reality the relation of which to the mind is solely that of knowledge. And we can only decide that all reality is dependent upon the mind by appeal to the special character of all the kinds of reality of which we are aware. Hence, Kant in the Aesthetic, and Berkeley before him, were essentially right in their procedure. ”

“ Kant begins with the thought of a phenomenon as a mere representation which, as mental, and as the representation of an object, is just not an object, and asks, 'What is meant by the object of it?' He finds the clue to the answer in the thought that though a representation or idea when considered in itself is a mere mental modification, yet, when considered as related to an object, it is subject to a certain necessity. In fact, however, an idea or knowledge is essentially an idea or knowledge of an object, and we are bound to think of it as such. ”

“ While the conceptions involved in the forms of perception, space, and time, and also the categories are the manifestations of the mind's own nature, sensations, which form the matter of knowledge, are due to the action of things in themselves on our sensibility, and of this activity we can say nothing. Hence, from the point of view of our mind—and since we do not know things in themselves, this is the only point of view we can take—the existence of sensations, and therefore of objects, which must be given in perception, is wholly contingent and only to be discovered through experience. ”

“ Mathematics carries with it thoroughly apodeictic certainty, that is, absolute necessity, and, therefore, rests on no empirical grounds, and consequently is a pure product of reason, and, besides, is thoroughly synthetical. How, then, is it possible for human reason to accomplish such knowledge entirely a priori?... But we find that all mathematical knowledge has this peculiarity, that it must represent its conception previously in perception, and indeed a priori, consequently in a perception which is not empirical but pure, and that otherwise it cannot take a single step. ”

“ Now, independently of sensibility, we cannot have any perception; consequently, the understanding is no faculty of perception. But besides perception there is no other kind of knowledge, except through conceptions. Consequently, the knowledge of every understanding, or at least of every human understanding, is a knowledge through conceptions,—not perceptive, but discursive. All perceptions, as sensuous, depend on affections; conceptions, therefore, upon functions. By the word function, I understand the unity of the act of arranging different representations under one common representation. ”

“ If we can question the truth of our thinking, we can likewise question the truth of our perception. If we can ask whether our ideas must correspond to their objects, we can likewise ask whether our perceptions must correspond to them. The problem relates solely to the correspondence between something within the mind and something outside it; it applies equally to perceiving and thinking, and concerns all judgements alike, empirical as well as a priori. Kant, therefore, has no right to imply that empirical judgements raise no problem, if he finds difficulty in a priori judgements. ”

“ How can I make an assertion about any individual until I have had actual experience of it? In an a priori synthetic judgement the mind in some way, in virtue of its own powers and independently of experience, makes an assertion to which it claims that reality must conform. Yet why should reality conform? ”

“ Again, if we suppose that we had merely the conception of a house, and neither perceived nor had perceived an individual to which it applied, we see that the conception, being without application, would be neither knowledge nor an element in knowledge. Moreover, the content of a conception is derived from perception; it is only through its relation to perceived individuals that we become aware of a universal. ”

“ To say that 'combining', in the sense of making, really presupposes consciousness of the nature of the whole produced, would be inconsistent with the previous assertion that even where the reality known is something made, the knowledge of it presupposes that the reality is already made. Strictly speaking, the activity of combining presupposes consciousness not of the whole which we succeed in producing, but of the whole which we want to produce. ”

“ We can say of two men that they are related as doctor and patient, or as father and son, for we can apprehend two beings as men without being aware of them as so related. But of no two elements is it possible to say that their relation is that of universal and individual, or of genus and species, or of surface and volume ”

“ The thing which we distinguish in our ordinary consciousness from its appearances is, after all, only another appearance; and although the physical problem is solved concerning its accordance with our special senses, there remains the philosophical problem as to whether this appearance need correspond to what in the end is the real thing, viz. that which exists in itself and apart from all perception. The only possible answer is that it need not. We therefore can only know appearances and not reality; in other words, we cannot have knowledge proper. ”

“ If we know the object of a complex conception to be possible, we already know it to be actual, and if we know it to be actual, we already know it to be necessary. A complex conception in the proper sense is the apprehension of a complex of elements together with the apprehension of, or insight into, their connexion. ”

“ But in philosophy an analogy is the assertion of the equality of two qualitative relations and is such that, if three of the terms are given, we can discover, not the fourth, but only the relation of the third to the fourth, though at the same time we are furnished with a clue whereby to search for the fourth in experience. In this philosophical sense, the principles involved in the categories of relation are analogies. ”

“ This recognition, which Kant considers only an element in knowledge, is really the knowledge itself. Again, since the reality to be known is a whole of parts which we construct on a principle, we know that it is such a whole, and therefore that 'the manifold is related to one object', because, and only because, we know that we have combined the elements on a principle. Self-consciousness therefore must be inseparable from consciousness of an object. ”