Kant's Transcendental Distinction between Affection and Function

Abstract

AT page So of my “Revival of Philosophy at Cambridge,” I ventured to describe a question set by Mr. Mahaffy, at Trinity College, Dublin, as “very oddly worded.” I might have said very improperly worded, and have justified the sentence; but for the fact that it was the Cambridge examination-papers only that were the subject of my criticism in that work. My boldness in this censure on Mr. Mahaffy has occasioned remark. That gentleman is confessedly a capital metaphysician, perhaps of greater power than the learned professor whose work he translated and annotated. I therefore ask for space in NATURE to assign the reasons on which I asserted that his question was “very oddly worded.” Here is the question: “Explain the statement that his [Kant's] doctrine of Space and Time is based on a transcendental distinction.” I think I cannot be in error in taking this as a reference to the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Transac. Æsth. § 8, Allgemeine Anmerkungen, &c., and in particular to the paragraph beginning “Die Leibnitz-Wolfische Philosophic,” &c., and that which immediately follows. In the former, and indeed in its immediate precursor, Kant is impugning the view that affection and function (Sense and Intellect) have only a logical difference, as if Sense were only differenced from Understanding by the inferiority of its representations, in precision and clearness. The latter paragraph (the third of those I have referred to) beginning “Wir unterschieden sonst wohl unter Erscheinungen das,” &c., may be thus rendered:—

“We otherwise draw a proper distinction, in phenomena, between that which is an essential property of the intuition of it, and is generally valid for every one's sense, on the one hand; and on the other, that which belongs to it accidentally, inasmuch as it is not valid for the faculty of general sensibility, but only for a particular state or organisation of this or that sense.”