ent) and then conceives the thing-in-itself as cause!— Here again we discover a remnant of dogmatism in Kant.
4. Kant proves the impossibility of constructing a science of "Ideas," both by the fact that ideas contain none of the conditions of experience (as is the case with the forms of intuition and the categories), and by means of a criticism of the attempts which have been made to establish such a science.
a. Criticism of speculative (spiritualistic) psychology. There is no justification for concluding from the unity of psychic life, which manifests itself in synthesis, the fundamental form of consciousness, that the soul is a being which is distinct from the body or a substance. Synthesis is only a form, which we are not permitted to regard as a separate substance. It is impossible for psychology to be more than a science of experience. There is no ground for interpreting the distinction between psychical and physical phenomena as a distinction between two entities: It is possible indeed that one and the same essence should form the basis of both kinds of phenomena.
b. Criticism of speculative cosmology. Every attempt at a scientific theory of the universe conceived as a totality is ever and anon confronted with contradictions. Our thought here culminates in antinomies; the universe must have a beginning (in space and time), else it were not a totality. But it is impossible to conceive the beginning or the end of space and of time, because every place (in space and in time) is thought in relation to other places.— Furthermore the world must consist of parts (atoms or monads) which are not further divisible, otherwise the summation of the parts could never be complete. But everything conceivable is divisible; we can think of every body as divided into smaller bodies.—The series of causes
