Textbook to Kant - 1881 Author:Immanuel Kant Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE REPRODUCTION. Introduction. State of the question: Descartes, Leibnitz, Locke, Hume. The general problem. The necessary conditions of its solution, and... more » consequent distribution of the whole inquiry. Descartes, as Leibnitz after him, held by innate ideas. Locke controverted the term innate, and assumed, as well, all our ideas to originate in the sensation or reflection of experience. For even reflection was to him but the mind's own further experience in manipulating the experience that was already due to sensation. If sensation were external sense, then, said Locke, reflection " might properly enough be called internal sense." " When," from these sources, " the understanding is once stored with simple ideas, it has the power to repeat, compare, and unite them, even to an almost infinite variety, and so can make at pleasure new complex ideas; but it is not in the power of the most exalted wit, or enlarged understanding, by any quickness or variety of thought, to invent or frame one new simple idea in the mind, not taken in by the ways aforementioned." Hume now, on the one hand, only accentuated these positions; but, on the other, he drew from them their natural consequences — consequences which Locke, for his part, had been so far from foreseeing that he hadeven reasoned, in excess of his principles, to their very opposites. It is part of these proceedings of Hume which we have now, in the first place, to see. The word idea with Locke is the Vorstcllung of the Germans. It is " the most general expression for all that is present to mental consciousness;" and it is quite as applicable to the products of sensation as to those of reflection. Hume altered this. He discriminated between these products,—naming the former impressions, and only the latter ideas. Impressions (...« less