A view of the philosophical principles of phrenology / by J. Spurzheim.

  • Johann Spurzheim
Date:
1825
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A view of the philosophical principles of phrenology / by J. Spurzheim. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    MODES OF ACTION OF THE FACULTIES. Q denies the possibility of proving the existence of external objects. The principal modern schools of philosophy in Germany, are the critical philosophy, the transcendental idealism, and the philosophy of nature. Kant, the founder of the critical phi- losophy, distinguished two kinds of knowledge, one experi- mental (Kritik der reinen Vernunft), and another founded on he]id [{Krilik der practischen Vemunft). He maintained that the first kind is only relative, subjective, or phenomenal, or that we know only the relation of the subject to the object; that we do not know either the subject or the object in itself, but both in their mutual relations only, and that this relation constitutes their reality to us. The subject he conceived endowed with particular categories which are applied to the object; whatever is general and necessary in knowledge belonged to the subject, while the particular and variable is the attribute of the object. Hence all experimental know- ledge is founded upon dualism ; upon the union of the subject and object; for, even the categories, though inherent in the subject, and conceived by the mind from within, acquire ob- jective reality only by their application to the object. Kant, though he considered both subject and object, had, however, the subject more in mind than the object. He reduced all categories or forms, according to which the mind acquires experimental knowledge, to four kinds—to quantity, quality, relation, and modality ; of these the two first concern objects in general, and the two last the relations of objects to each other, and to our understanding. Thus Kant admits notions independent of experience, as conceptions of space, time,