Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/201

THE NATURE OF JUDGMENT. 187 concepts used in them. Empirical concepts are those which can exist in parts of time. This would seem to be the only manner of distinguishing them. And any proposition into which an empirical concept enters may be called empirical. Kant himself does recognise the necessity involved in such a proposition as ' This body is heavy,' although, for reasons vhich will appear hereafter, he states it in a somewhat dif- ferent way. The main object of his ' Analytic ' is to show that any such judgment involves a ' synthesis of the manifold of sense-intuition,' which is ' necessary a priori ' (p. 126). But he regards this synthesis rather as necessary in order to bring mere perceptions into relation with the ' unity of apperception,' than as directly involved in the empirical judgment. Moreover, in order to explain how the forms of synthesis can apply to the manifold, he introduces the inner sense as mediator, and describes the judgment as converting the psychical connexion of the presentations into an objective connexion rather than as applying the categories to a mere manifold, which cannot properly be described as psychical. Accordingly he gives as the ultimate empirical judgment, out of which the application of substance and attribute produces ' Bodies are heavy,' the subjective judgment ' When I carry a body, I feel an impression of heaviness/ instead of that given above ' Heaviness and the marks of body exist together.' 1 He does not seem to see that his subjective judgment al- ready fully involves the category in question. A statement about my feelings is just as ' objective,' in the required sense, as a statement about what is conceived as in space. With the above definition, therefore, it is obvious why ' Body is heavy ' should be called empirical ; whereas, if absence of necessity had been the mark required, it would have been difficult to find a reason. For this proposition does not only involve, like ' This body is heavy ' or ' All bodies are heavy,' the necessary judgments that body is a thing, and heaviness an attribute ; it asserts a relation between a ' heaviness ' and ' corporeity ' such as no ex- perience can prove or disprove. If we found a body which was not heavy, that would indeed lead us to deny the truth of the proposition ; but it would also entitle us at once to the opposite necessary proposition ' Body cannot be heavy '. And this is just what holds of 2 + 2 = 4. It is perhaps inconceivable to us now that two and two should not make four ; but, when numbers were first discovered, it may well have been thought that two and two made three or five. 1 P. 121, ef. also Prol., p. 54 n.