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‘Had you seen but these roads before they were made,
You’d lift up your hands and bless Marshal Wade.’

The pleasant bull here committed conceals a most melancholy truth, and one of large extent. Innumerable are the services to truth, to justice, or society, which never can be adequately valued by those who reap their benefits, simply because the transition from the early and bad state to the final or improved state cannot be retraced or kept alive before the eyes. The record perishes. The last point gained is seen; but the starting-point, the points from which it was gained, is forgotten. And the traveller never can know the true amount of his obligations to Marshal Wade, because, though seeing the roads which the Marshal has created, he can only guess at those which he superseded. Now, returning to this impenetrable passage of Kant, I will briefly inform the reader that he may read it into sense by connecting it with a part of Kant’s system, from which it is in his own delivery entirely dislocated. Going forwards some thirty or forty pages, he will find Kant’s development of his own categories. And, by placing in juxtaposition with that development this blind sentence, he will find a reciprocal light arising. All philosophers, worthy of that name, have found it necessary to allow of some great cardinal ideas that transcended all the Lockian origination–ideas that were larger in their compass than any possible notices of sense or any reflex notices of the understanding; and those who have denied such ideas, will be found invariably to have supported their denial by a vitium subreptionis, and to have deduced their pretended genealogies of such ideas by means of a petitio principii–silently and stealthily putting into some step of their leger-de-main process everything that they would pretend to have extracted from it. But, previously to Kant, it is certain that all philosophers had left the origin of these higher or transcendent ideas unexplained. Whence came they? In the systems to which, Locke replies, they had been called innate or connate. These were the Cartesian systems. Cudworth, again, who maintained certain ‘immutable ideas‘ of morality, had said nothing about their origin; and Plato had supposed them to be reminiscences from some higher mode of existence. Kant first attempted to assign them an origin within the mind itself, though not in any Lockian fashion of reflection upon sensible impressions. And this is doubtless what he means by saying that he first had investigated the mind–that is, he first for such a purpose.

Where, then, is it, in what act or function of the mind, that Kant finds the matrix of these transcendent ideas? Simply in the logical forms of the understanding. Every power exerts its agency under some laws–that is, in the language of Kant, by certain forms. We leap by certain laws–viz. of equilibrium, of muscular motion, of gravitation. We dance by certain laws. So also we reason by certain laws. These laws, or formal principles, under a particular condition, become the categories.

Here, then, is a short derivation, in a very few words, of those ideas transcending sense, which all philosophy, the earliest, has been unable to dispense with, and yet none could account for. Thus, for example, every act of reasoning must, in the first place, express itself in distinct propositions; that is, in such as contain a subject (or that concerning which you affirm or deny something), a predicate (that which you affirm or deny), and a copula, which connects them. These propositions must have what is technically called, in logic, a certain quantity, or compass (viz. must be universal, particular, or singular); and again they must have what is called quality (that is, must be affirmative, or negative, or infinite): and thus arises a ground for certain corresponding ideas, which are Kant’s categories of quantity and quality.

But, to take an illustration more appropriately from the very idea which first aroused Kant to the sense of a vast hiatus in the received philosophies–the idea of cause, which had been thrown as an apple of discord amongst the schools, by Hume. How did Kant deduce this? Simply thus: it is a doctrine of universal logic, that there are three varieties of syllogism–viz. 1st, Categoric, or directly declarative [A is B]; 2nd, Hypothetic, or conditionally declarative [If C is D, then A is B]; 3rd, Disjunctive, or declarative, by means of a choice which exhausts the possible cases [A is either B, or C, or D; but not C or D; ergo B]. Now, the idea of causation, or, in Kant’s language, the category of Cause and Effect, is deduced immediately, and most naturally, as the reader will acknowledge on examination, from the 2nd or hypothetic form of syllogism, when the relation of dependency is the same as in the idea of causation, and the necessary connection a direct type of that which takes place between a cause and its effect.