reason in knowing finds vigorous application throughout all the sciences, for in all of them the particular is known through the general ; but in Botany, Zoology, Mineralogy, and other classifying sciences, it is the chief guide and predominates absolutely. The law of motives (motivation) is the chief guide in History, Politics, Pragmatic Psychology, &c. &c., when we consider all motives and maxims, whatever they may be, as data for explaining actions but when we make those motives and maxims the object-matter of investigation from the point of view of their value and origin, the law of motives becomes the guide to Ethics. In my chief work will be found the highest classification of the sciences according to this principle.[1]
§ 52. Two principal Results.
I have endeavoured in this treatise to show that the Principle of Sufficient Reason is a common expression for four completely different relations, each of which is founded upon a particular law given a priori (the principle of sufficient reason being a synthetical a priori principle). Now, according to the principle of homogeneiy, we are compelled to assume that these four laws, discovered according to the principle of specification, as they agree in being expressed by one and the same term, must necessarily spring from one and the same original quality of our whole cognitive faculty as their common root, which we should accordingly have to look upon as the innermost germ of all dependence, relativeness, instability and limitation of the objects of our consciousness—itself limited to Sensibility, Understanding, Reason, Subject and Object—or of that world, which the divine Plato repeatedly degrades to the ἀεί γιγνόμενον μἐν καί ἀπολλύμενον, ὀντως δὲ ούδέποτε ὀν (
- ↑ "Die Welt a. W. u. V.," vol. ii. ch. 12, p. 126 of the 2nd edition (p. 139 of the 3rd edition).
