Conclusion of the Solution of the Psychological Paralogism.
The dialectical illusion in rational psychology arises from our
confounding an idea of reason (of a pure intelligence) with the
conception— in every respect undetermined— of a thinking being in
general. I cogitate myself in behalf of a possible experience, at
the same time making abstraction of all actual experience; and infer
therefrom that I can be conscious
of myself apart from experience
and its empirical conditions. I consequently confound the possible
abstraction of my empirically determined existence with the supposed
consciousness of a possible
separate existence of my thinking self;
and I believe that I cognize what is substantial in myself as a
transcendental subject, when I have nothing more in thought than the
unity of consciousness, which lies at the basis of all determination
of cognition.
The task of explaining the community of the soul with the body
does not properly belong to the psychology of which we are here
speaking; because it proposes to prove the personality of the soul
apart from this communion (after death), and is therefore transcendent
in the proper sense of the word, although occupying itself with an
object of experience— only in so far, however, as it ceases to be an
object of experience. But a sufficient answer may be found to the
question in our system. The difficulty which lies in the execution
of this task consists, as is well known, in the presupposed
heterogeneity of the object of the internal sense (the soul) and the
objects of the external senses; inasmuch as the formal condition of
the intuition of the one is time, and of that of the other space also.
But if we consider that both kinds of objects do not differ
internally, but only in so far as the one appears externally to the
other— consequently, that what lies at the basis of phenomena, as a
thing in itself, may not be heterogeneous; this difficulty disappears.
There then remains no other difficulty than is to be found in the
question— how a community of substances is possible; a question
which lies out of the region of psychology, and which the reader,
after what in our analytic has been said of primitive forces and
faculties, will easily judge to be also beyond the region of human
cognition.
