pure sensibility to the higher faculty of cognition and speak of an intuiting reason.
The forms of intuition and of thought come from within, they lie ready in the mind a priori, though not as completed representations. They are functions, necessary actions of the soul, for the execution of which a stimulus from without, through sensations, is necessary, but which, when once this is given, the soul brings forth spontaneously. The external impulse merely gives the soul the occasion for such productive acts, while their grounds and laws are found in its own nature. In this sense Kant terms them "originally acquired," and in the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason declares that although it is indubitable that "all our knowledge begins with experience (impressions of sense), yet it does not all arise from experience." That a representation or cognition is a priori[1] does not mean that it precedes experience in time, but that (apart from the merely exciting, non-productive stimulation through impressions already mentioned) it is independent of all experience, that it is not derived or borrowed from experience.
The material of intuition and thought is given to the soul, received by it; it arises through the action of objections upon the senses, and is always empirical. Intuition is the only organ of reality; in sensation the presence of a real object as the cause of the sensation is directly revealed. When Kant's transcendental idealism was placed by a reviewer on a level with the empirical idealism of Berkeley, which denies the existence of the external world, he distinctly asserted that it had never entered his mind to question the reality of external things. Further, after the existence of real thing affecting the senses had been transformed in his mind from a basis of the investigation into an object of inquiry, he endeavored to defend this assump-
- ↑ The terms a priori representation and pure representation (concept, intuition) are equivalent; but in judgments, on the other hand, there is a distinction. A judgment is a priori when the connection takes place independently of experience, no matter whether the concepts connected are a priori or not. If the former is the case the a priori judgment is pure (mixed with nothing empirical); if the latter, it is mixed.
