The necessary revolution in man's thinking after Immanuel Kant

are they rational forms regulating the objective world from within.

At this point Kant found that the next step was to show how this was possible, that is, how the process of cognition really takes place in the way that he was trying to describe. His first attempt to expound his theory—a brief dissertation “concerning the form and principles of the sensible and intelligible universe’, dated 1770—was his inaugural lecture delivered on the occasion of taking up his appointment to the Chair of Philosophy at Koenigsberg, at the age of 46. But the complete formulation of the Kantian theory of cognition was not published till 1781, in a work entitled “The Critique of Pure Reason’.

In this work Kant gives his description of the way cognition operates. He doesn’t deny the existence of a reality-in-itself, but says that for us it is unknowable, because the direct impact which we receive from outside ourselves is merely an abundance of sensory stimuli, which in themselves donot amount to knowledge. If they are to become an object of possible cognition, Kant says, these sensory data have first of all to be transformed in an act or process of ‘intuitional synthesis’, as he called it, whereby this confused welter of sensory stimuli takes on a new form, as a mental image. This image originates in our minds through stimulation by the senses and then adapts itself to the framework provided by two a priori forms which give it a precise consistency ; these forms are those of space and time, and they serve to consolidate the baffling confusion of sensory data into a coherent intuition. In this way the raw material of cognition is created from the synthesis of the transcendental a priori forms, space and time, with the crude data of the senses. Thus it is that sensory stimuli acquire the form of an intuition, that is to say, some definite mental pattern—a symbol, as Cassirer would call itwhich is precisely what distinguishes human thought from the instinctive activity of the animal psyche.

Such is the initial stage of Kant’s cognitive process, and before we pass on to the second stage we should consider more closely the a priori forms which make it possible, namely space and time. These have no independent existence apart from the intuition, of which they are a constituent part, serving as its necessary structure. Kant calls them transcendental, because they are not forms of a self-existent subject, nor are they present in a self-consistent real

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