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Section Eight: The First Part, Continued

25 September, 2015 - 14:22

But the difficulty seems rather to increase than to diminish by this step. For the question is now: How is it possible to intuit anything apriori? Intuition is a presentation, as it would immediately depend on the presence of the object. It seems therefore impossible to intuit originally apriori, because the intuition must then take place without either a previous or present object to which it could refer, and hence could not be intuition. Conceptions are indeed of a nature that some of them, namely, those containing only the thought of an object in general, may be very well formed apriori, without our being in immediate relation to the object (e.g., the conceptions of quantity, of cause, &c.), but even these require a certain use inconcreto, i.e., an application to some intuition, if they are to acquire sense and meaning, whereby an object of them is to be given us. But how can intuition of an object precede the object itself?