CHAPTER 4

The steps taken by philosophy through Plato, Leibniz and Kant,
and the work still to be done

366. Plato, more clearly than any other philosopher, and after him Leibniz and Kant, experienced to some extent the difficulty present in explaining the great fact of ideas.
The minor philosophers who overlooked this difficulty and whom I mentioned in the preceding Section - however meritorious their contribution to other branches of philosophy - cannot aspire to a place with those who attempted to discover and produced a solution to this particular problem. Our three philosophers, however, who concentrated their finest intellectual efforts on pursuing the discovery of such a noble truth, played an outstanding part in the history of the solution of such an important and capital problem.
It is also true that the question, passing from one of these philosophers to the next, made progress in the following way.

We saw that in attempting to assign a cause for facts given by experience, we must not put forward a cause greater than the effect. In this case, something in the cause would be superfluous. We have also seen that where a number of causes are put before the mind as equally capable of explaining the effect in question, the least or most simple cause offering an explanation is to be considered the most likely (cf. 26-28).
All three philosophers posited something innate in their explanation of the fact of the origin of ideas. This was sufficient for the explanation they intended to offer. At the same time, however, they posited an excessive, somewhat arbitrary degree of innateness.

Later contributors benefited from their predecessors in that each one whittled down to some extent the superfluity of his predecessor. Progress was gradually made, and the correct boundaries of the problem were set little by little. All the signs were that, in their hands, philosophy had chosen a path leading to perfection and truth which it would finally have reached if, before reaching its goal, it had not been overtaken by extraneous, fatal misfortunes and had not dealt itself a mortal blow.
Leibniz posited less that was innate than Plato who posited innate but forgotten ideas. Leibniz wanted only tiny vestiges of ideas which, in accordance with some kind of harmony, would have the power to relieve and reinforce one another (cf. 293-294).

I have already pointed out that these vestiges of ideas make no clear sense. All that can be admitted about the different ways in which ideas are present within us is applicable only to the state of non-reflective and reflective ideas (cf. 288-292). The question about the degrees of intuitive force can be set aside because it refers to the subject rather than the object.
But Leibniz's thought, which envisages tiny, insensible perceptions, shows very clearly the need he felt to remove the excessive feature of Plato's theory by accepting less of what was innate than Plato and Descartes acknowledged. But he could think of no other way of analysing ideas and isolating what was innate in them than by imagining them as devoid of light and feeling in the depth of our soul.

Kant came on the scene soon afterwards and had more success. He took advantage of a distinction which, although very ancient, was ignored by modern thinkers: the division of ideas into their formal and their material parts.
Conscious of the importance of this distinction, Kant regarded as innate (cf. 324-326) only the forms of cognitions, and left sense experience to provide their matter. This was an excellent thought and when viewed in relation to the spirit of Plato's philosophy seems to be the key with which to penetrate Plato's own intention. Plato himself perhaps was unclear about his aim and unable to communicate it exactly and coherently.(269)
Kant, by restricting what is innate in us to the pure forms of cognitions, introduced into the human spirit less of what was innate than all his predecessors. Nevertheless, he realised the necessity of admitting just enough for a full explanation of the fact of ideas and human cognitions [App., no. 33].

367. Kant introduced seventeen forms into the human mind to explain the fact of cognitions: two for sense (internal and external) twelve for the intellect (pure concepts or categories), and three for reason (ideas).
This entire list of forms was excessive; the formal element of reason is much simpler. He did not succeed in expressing sufficiently well the subtle division between the matter and the form of knowledge, and extracting the purely formal element devoid of anything material.

This species of metaphysical chemistry which I have attempted convinces me that these Kantian forms are no more the formal elements of human knowledge than the four elements of Empedocles are the simple substances from which various bodies are derived. But just as progress in chemistry broke down the ancient elements of water, earth, fire and air into a greater number of principles, so metaphysics, in happier but opposite sense, offers as the final result of its analysis a much smaller number of formal elements of human knowledge. Finally, it reduces to the greatest simplicity - to one alone, the form both of reason and of knowledge.(270)

Kant, therefore, admitted too much that was innate. Let us look more closely at how this came about and prepare ourselves for the path we shall have to follow in the next Section when, putting aside examination of others' conclusions, I shall set about fulfilling my other obligation to the reader: that of presenting the theory of the origin of ideas which, in my view, conforms to the truth.

368. Kant sets forth and describes his forms in the most systematic way: one form for the external sense, one for the internal sense; the intellect has precisely four, but each is sub-divided into three: finally, reason has precisely three, neither more nor less.
The orderliness which Kant's philosophy everywhere exhibits - it seems to have been devised using a set-square and guidelines - is calculated to alert the scholar to examine with greater care whether such a symmetrical and restricted arrangement is natural. In its other works, nature is usually simple and fruitful in a more abundant and grandiose manner than is the case with impoverished, presumptuous human imagination.

369. At this point, I make no claim to undertake a detailed inquiry into the Kantian forms. Although he said that he would deduce the categories strictly from the forms of judgments - always an extremely happy idea - he did not keep his promise. He presents us with a ready-made table of categories, claiming on his own authority it was perfect. Nowhere, that I can recall, does he attempt to demonstrate that the number of such categories resulting from the forms of judgment is precisely twelve, and assigned three by three with perfect distributive justice to each of the four fundamental forms. But Kant, by not justifying the symmetrical inference of the categories, left us in doubt, as Aristotle (whom he criticises(271)) also did, whether they are correctly deduced and enumerated, that is, whether they are the only twelve classes into which all human knowledge should inevitably be placed and divided. It would, therefore, be out of place to undertake a detailed critique of this division (which is just as arbitrary as the ancient division) of the most universal ideas of the human understanding.

370. It is immediately evident that, at times, he confuses the outward form which our ideas are given by different views of mind and language with the ideas themselves. He groups and classifies the same concept differently because its outward form is different. This facilitates the symmetrical arrangement of the division. For example, in the form of quality he discovered the sub-division of infinite judgments, which are, in fact, no different from affirmative or negative judgments except in the outward form of speech.(272)

371. In the same way, Kant seems to omit ideas which determine the classes of human knowledge and could have been placed in the categories solely because he feared that they might exceed the established number and ruin the desired, regular arrangement. Thus, continuous and intensive quantity ought to be put into the category of quantity, where he puts only discrete quantity because it furnishes him with the three sterling classes of unity, plurality and totality.

372. At times, he endeavours to preserve the regular symmetry by doing violence to certain ideas. He tries to reduce these ideas to those which have had the good fortune to be honoured as categories. For instance, he wants to reduce truth to plurality, and goodness to totality as though the abstract idea of plurality could contain the notion of what is true and the abstract idea of all could contain the notion of the what is good [App., no. 34].

373. In the ideas which he calls ideas of reason and are forms of the absolute, he confuses what is truly absolute, as God is, with what is relatively absolute, such as the human soul and the universe. In the end, all ideas of the absolute must, according to Kant, finally be reduced to one, indivisible idea, that is, to the ens of ens, to God.
Thus Kant's three ideas, or forms of reason, are reduced to one.

374. However, the very idea of God, considered as form of reason, as Kant presents it to us, is ambiguous.
God is to be taken either as a subsistent being or merely as a pure idea of our mind. For the sake of its own satisfaction, our mind thinks as possible and necessary a species of hypothesis about the final cause.
This final cause, seen as a pure, indeterminate, abstract hypothesis, which the mind needs for its own satisfaction, is not what we call God. Kant, therefore, when referring to God in the Critique of Pure Reason, does a kind of sleight of hand, using in a different way from normal a term considered venerable by mankind in order to deceive his readers and ward off the ignominious title of atheist.(273)

In truth, God, if considered as real Being, could not be a natural form of our reason, in this life here below, without being at the same time the matter of our thought because we can conceive God only according to likenesses based upon the finite beings which we experience. The form of our reason here below is ideal being, a rule through which, when forming judgments, we come to know real entia. The form of our knowledge must therefore accommodate itself to all objects of knowledge, and cannot be one of them.
Granted this, let us see what universal, formal elements there are in the idea of a first cause, which is the Kantian idea of God.
Analysing the idea of a first cause, we find within it two other more elementary ideas which go to form it: 1. the idea of cause in general; 2. the idea of the cause of all causes or of all that is (finite).
The cause of all that is, is found only through the application of the idea of cause in general to all that is.
The idea of cause contains the principle: 'Every event must have its cause.'
The application of this principle to the complex of all events (to the universe) produces the proposition: 'The complex of everything finite (the universe) must have its cause'.

This proposition is merely a consequence of the principle; it is contained in the principle as though in a seed. It does not, therefore, offer any new notion which informs our mind, different from the notion of cause in general. Hence the idea of a first cause cannot be an originating form of the human mind, different from the notion of cause in general.
However, the idea of cause in general is already included by Kant in the twelve categories.
None of Kant's three ideas of reason, therefore, can truly be called the form of our intellect. Kant confused in these ideas the matter of thought with what pertains to the form.

375. Let us now examine the twelve categories which Kant calls the forms of the intellect, and the two forms of the internal and external sense. Let us see whether they are all truly originating and primal forms of our mind, as Kant claims.
I note first that Kant's twelve categories cannot all aspire to the same status in such a way that each may be independent of the others and thus sui generis; they cannot be reduced and aligned under each other as minor classes under major ones.
Take the form of modality. It has under it the three categories of possibility, existence and necessity.
Now compare this form with the other three, that is, the forms of quantity, quality and relationship.
I am perfectly able to conceive a possible or existent ens without having to know its quantity, its quality and relationships.
In this case, my intellect is conditioned by the law of having to think such a being either as possible or as existent or as necessary;(274) but my intellect is not in any way obliged to furnish this ens with the forms of quantity, quality and relationship.

If an act of the intellect can, therefore, be posited without need of the three forms of quantity, quality and relationship, these, by implication, are not necessary and essential forms. They do not inform and constitute in its proper nature the operation of the intellect. Consequently, these are not the forms which we are seeking. We are looking for those forms by which the intellect is intellect, and through which intellectual operation exists, that is, the forms which constitute the proximate, essential and necessary term of the intellectual act.

It follows that the form of modality is independent of the forms of quantity, quality and relationship. Hence the understanding, with the single form of modality, can carry out some of its acts without need of the other forms.
On the other hand, we cannot think of the quantity, quality and relationships of an ens unless we have previously thought it either as possible or existent.
All three forms of quantity, quality and relationship depend therefore on the form of modality which is greater than the other three. These can only occur in thought by means of, and subsequent to, modality.
We are justified, therefore, in concluding that Kant's first three forms, quantity, quality and relationship cannot be considered as original and essential forms of the understanding because its existence and operation can be conceived without any need of them.

376. The same is true for another reason. Is it necessary for every ens to have a determined quantity and quality?
To affirm this categorically, as Kant does, is to convict critical reason of extremely dogmatic self-assurance and rashness and endow it with the power to decide a question which cannot possibly be determined a priori.
Kant could have said: 'To maintain that every possible ens must be endowed with a fixed quantity and quality is a claim that goes beyond the forces of reason because, in order to make such a claim, we would need to examine all possible entia as well as examining the infinite Being, of which we have no positive and adequate notion.' In this case, he would have displayed a modicum of true or certainly apparent philosophical modesty. He would have shown some self-consistency. But he has none, although nothing pleases and gratifies him more than being able to criticise reason and rail against the philosophers he scornfully calls dogmatists, that is, against all those who openly profess something as certain. However, he had pronounced judgment on the issue and affirmed that quantity and quality were among the first-born forms of the human understanding, without which the understanding could not think of anything at all. This was blatant audacity, and revealed the barrenness of critical philosophy, shorn of the mask of philosophical humbug.

We must conclude, therefore, that modality alone is the only one of the Kantian forms which may be called an original form of the human understanding - a form which informs the intellect and the knowledge proceeding from the intellect. Let us see whether modality contains anything we are seeking.

377. I first note that when I think and judge that something exists, I do not necessarily perfect my idea of the existing thing.
Indeed I can have an idea as perfect and determinate as required, even though the ens corresponding to it does not really exist.
Consequently, the judgment that the thing of which I have the idea really exists is an act intrinsically different from the one whereby my intellect possesses and contemplates the idea. The judgment adds nothing to my idea, no new notion informs my mind through the judgment.
Real and external existence, therefore, the term of my judgment, cannot be any original form of my understanding which contains only the idea of the thing. The idea neither increases nor diminishes, nor undergoes any alteration from the subsistence or non-subsistence of the thing itself.
The form of the intellect, therefore, can only be an idea, not the subsistence of the thing. Hence, existence, one of the three categories, possibility, existence, and necessity, cannot in any way be an original, essential form of our understanding when considered separately from the other two.

378. Let us see if the other two, possibility and necessity, have the characteristics of originating, essential forms.
The idea of any thing whatsoever (insofar as it does not have any internal repugnance) is what is called the logical possibility of the thing.
Now, it is of course impossible to perform any act of understanding without the form of possibility.
However, when I think of the possibility of a thing, I am not required to think explicitly of its absolute necessity if this necessity refers to the thing thought and not to its possibility. If the necessity refers to the possibility, it is not distinguished from the possibility, of which it is an abstract quality.
Necessity cannot, therefore, be an original, primal form of my understanding because it is not the object and universal, immutable term of my understanding.
This leads us to conclude that, of all the twelve Kantian forms, the human intellect has only one, possibility. Let us see what it is.

379. I said that the possibility we are discussing is the idea of any thing whatsoever. In fact, possibility must always be thought of any thing, because the possibility of nothing cannot be thought.
Possibility, therefore, is indissociable from any thing whatsoever; on the other hand, it may be united to any thing whatsoever.
For us to be able to conceive possibility, therefore, it is not necessary for the thing we are thinking of to be determined to a genus, a species or an individual. It only needs to be something, an ens, even perfectly indeterminate.
The idea (possibility) of the indeterminate ens is the sole original, essential form of the human intellect.

380. Let us see now how all of Kant's nine first forms of the intellect are reduced to this alone, as to their formal principle, and how the other two categories of modality (existence and necessity) either have nothing formal or are elements already contained in possibility. Let us begin with these.
If by existence we mean the idea of the existence of a thing in all its universality, this is comprised in the idea of indeterminate ens.
If by existence we mean the actual subsistence of an ens, this is only the term of the faculty of judgment and does not add any form to the intellect.
The analysis of possibility enables us to discover necessity; what is possible is necessarily so. In this sense, necessity is comprised even in the idea of ens in all its universality.
However, if by necessity we mean a real, necessary ens, we have of this what was said universally speaking about the actual existence of entia.

381. With the three categories of modality reduced to the single form of the idea of an ens in all its universality, let us see how the three which come under the heading of relationship, that is substance, cause and action, are reduced to the same form.
I have already shown that the entire intellectual content in the ideas of substance and cause is nothing other than the idea of existence and of ens in all its universality (cf. 52-54, 347-348). Kant, therefore, in placing substance and cause in the categories, or original, essential forms of the human intellect, did so because he failed to analyse the categories sufficiently to discover what was pure form in them.
Note, relative to the idea of action, that both the understanding and the senses perceive action, although the latter do this by experiencing it in their own way.
Particular action, insofar as it is perceived by sense, cannot be placed in the categories. This is reserved solely for action conceived by the intellect or - which amounts to the same thing - the concept of action.

But how does it come about that the particular action perceived by sense becomes universal when it becomes the object of the intellect? This depends on the understanding's power to consider the particular action experienced by sense as possible, that is, repeatable an indefinite number of times. It is, therefore, the addition of possibility which transforms the action into a universal concept. The same holds good when I consider what constitutes the nature of action in general, and I abandon consideration of the particularities of the different species of action.
The concept of action, therefore, when subjected to analysis, is found not to be an entirely pure form of the intellect. Rather, it is made up of 1. a material element insofar as it refers to acts experienced by our sense; and 2. of a formal element in so far as our intellect adds the form of possibility and thus abstracts and universalises particular actions.
The only formal element, therefore, in the idea of action is possibility, that is, the idea of ens in all its universality.

382. Undertaking a similar analysis, we are able to reduce Kant's quantity and quality to the form of ens in all its universality by separating their material element from them, and retaining only their formal element. Such an analysis, however, leads us to the conclusion that these concepts contain no formal element apart from the idea of possibility or - which amounts to the same thing - of ens in all its universality.

Indeed, even the term of my sense has a certain quantity and a certain quality. But quantity and quality perceived by my sense are not in the least the form of my intellect. Quantity, therefore, and quality as concept and, according to Kant, as form of my intellect, are not particular quantity and quality, but quantity and quality considered in all its universality.
If we adopt the same approach to quantity and quality as we did to the concept of action, we can see how we arrive at quantity and quality in all their universality. When I perceive a particular quantity and then think it purely as possible, I have by this operation alone made it universal. If I remove from this idea, or possible quantity, the features which specify it, and thus generalise it, I have in it quantity in general.
Quantity or quality, therefore, are not naturally the object of my intellect as though they were an intrinsic form of the intellect. To become such an object, they need to be informed by another form. The form which my intellect adds is, in fact, that of possibility.
Quantity and quality are per se matter. My intellect, by informing them, makes them into one of its concepts.

This concept of quantity and quality, therefore, (when analysed) has nothing formal in it except the idea of possibility or ens in all its universality.
Thus, Kant's twelve forms are reduced to one single, pure and true form.

383. There is no need, at this point, to mention what Kant calls forms of the external and internal sense, that is, space and time. These do not pertain to the order of intellectual things. Such a question can only involve their concepts.
The formal element in such concepts, therefore, is possibility alone, or the idea of indeterminate ens. What has been said proves this.

384. There is, however, another difference to note between the nature of Kant's multiple forms and the nature of the single form with which we are left after all the others have vanished. Kant's forms all come from deep within the subject and are therefore subjective. But the true form is essentially object. This difference in nature is of infinite importance, as we shall see; at this point I can only forewarn the reader of the diversity.

I conclude: the human mind has no innate determinate form. Kant's seventeen forms have no true foundation, and are completely superfluous in the explanation of the origin of ideas.

On the contrary, the human mind has a single, indeterminate form: the idea of ens in all its universality.
The idea of ens in all its universality is pure form, and has no material element associated with it; it is not subjective, but rather per se objective. It is so simple and so elementary that it cannot be simplified further, nor can anything more elementary be conceived which may be capable of informing our cognitions. At the same time, it is infinitely rich in promise.
Truly, it is impossible to imagine any act whatsoever of the mind which does not need this form, and is not natured and informed by it. If the idea of being is removed, human knowledge and the mind itself are rendered impossible.
Having reduced what is innate in the human mind to the minimum possible, I now have to show how this minimum is nevertheless sufficient to explain fully the origin of all our ideas. This will form the argument of the following Section.

(269) In a few passages, Kant adopts the mantle of Plato's interpreter. For instance, in dealing with his three ideas or concepts of reason, and relative to the understanding of Plato's philosophy, he makes the following observations:'Let me say that it is nothing unusual, in conversation and in writing, to understand an author better than he understands himself by comparing the various things he has to say on a given subject. He may not have sufficiently determined his concept, and thus have reasoned, or even thought, in a way opposed to what he intended' (Critique of Pure Reason, Logic, Transcendental Dialectic, bk. 1, section 1, in Cav. Mantovani's translation into the vernacular).

(270) There is something inherently absurd and contradictory in the multiplicity of the forms of understanding and knowledge. If, in fact, I use the word understanding to refer to something determinate, and the word is not a vague term with no specific meaning, and I use the word knowledge to express something which has a single essence enabling it to be distinguished from any other, it is inevitable that understanding and knowledge have only one single form which determines these things to be what they are. The form of a thing is what constitutes the essence, that which makes it what it is. But a thing cannot have a number of essences or a number of forms. This would be as much a contradiction as saying that a thing can be many things, that a thing can be what it is not. What Kant calls a form, therefore, has to be something subordinate to the first and true form of understanding and knowledge. They may be what Kant calls partial and derivative forms, but they are not what we are seeking, the form which constitutes the nature of the understanding. As pure form, it is not multiplied except by union with something external and real.

(271) In Transcendental Analytic, bk. 1, c. 1, he refers to 'the guiding thread for the discovery of all pure concepts of the intellect' and attributes it to the nature of judgment. Later, however, he does not deduce the forms from judgments but merely sets them out in a table. He does not bother to show the necessity for twelve, or that they cannot be more or less, or different, or in any different order from that in which he presents them.

(272) Kant puts forward the following example of infinite judgments, 'The soul is not mortal'; he claims that this judgment differs in form from: 'The soul is immortal'. Now if 'by form', we mean the outward trapping of words, I agree with him, although in itself the word immortal is perfectly synonymous with not mortal and therefore does not differ in the inner, conceptive form of which I am speaking. The forms which arise from speech are too numerous and merely apparent. One form of the mind is displayed and clad in a number of external ways. Let us take as an example a negative attribute which does not have only one opposite (as, for example, 'mortal' which has only the one opposite 'immortal') but a number of opposites, such as colours (affirming, for example that a body is not green does not, in fact, affirm that it is red). Such a case is complex, and comprises two pairs of judgments. The first pair, 'It is not green' and its opposite 'It is green', and the second pair, 'It is red' and its contrary 'It is not red'. When complex judgments are reduced to simple ones, only affirmative or negative judgments can be made (whether one affirms or denies with probability or certainty). The class of infinite judgments is merely a mixture of the two forms of judgment and does not produce any new, original form.

(273) In Kant's Pure Reason, God is viewed merely as a type in our mind of a most perfect being, an ideal, an exemplar. This does not permit us to come to any conclusion about his real existence.

(274) What is possible is always necessary. This threefold division is therefore defective. The exact division would be 1. possible; 2. existent, with subdivisions of a) contingent, b) necessary. However, the systematic threefold classification is sacrificed.