Note 551 — Chapter XXVIII

Kant, by the way, made a strange tactical blunder in his way of showing that the forms of our necessary thought are underived from experience. He insisted on thought-forms with which experience largely agrees, forgetting that the only forms which could not by any possibility be the results of experience would be such as experience violated. The first thing a Kantian ought to do is to discover forms of judgment to which no order in 'things' runs parallel. These would indeed be features native to the mind. I owe this remark to Herr A. Spir, in whose 'Denken und Wirklichkeit' it is somewhere contained. I have myself already to some extent proceeded, and in the pages which follow shall proceed still farther, to show the originality of the mind's structure in this way.