ABSTRACT
Against the background of transcendental idealism, the rich idiom of faculties provides a simple-sounding statement of the aims of the next stage of the critical inquiry. The co-operation of sensibility and understanding is essential to experience, as is also the excitement of these faculties by things as they are in themselves. What sensibility brings a priori to experience has already been declared in a Transcendental Aesthetic. It is for a Transcendental Logic to determine the a priori contribution of understanding. This science "will concern itself with the laws of understanding ... solely in so far as they relate a priori to objects" .I
If we attempt to detach this statement of aims from the transcendental idealist background, and to re-phrase it in our austerer idiom, we may seem to be faced with a fairly blank prospect. For experience to be possible at all, we must become aware of particular items and become aware of them as falling under general concepts. Thus we render the duality of intuitions and concepts, the necessary co-operation of sensibility and understanding. We can conceive of no form of experience which does not involve a temporal ordering of the particular items of which we become aware; and perhaps (though this has still to be argued) we cannot coherently conceive of any form of experience which does not involve a spatial ordering of at least some of those items. Thus we render the thesis of the Aesthetic regarding the a priori contributions of sensibility. What question now confronts us? It seems that the question must run something like this: abstracting from the forms of particularity, from the temporal and spatial ordering of particular items encountered in experience, what features can we find to be necessarily involved in any coherent conception of experience solely in virtue of the fact that the particular items of which we become aware must fall under (be brought under) general concepts ?
