"
What does he call this new science? He calls it _Transcendental
Aesthetic_, and refuses to allow the term to be used for the Critique of
Taste, which could never become a science.
But although he thus states so clearly the necessity of a science of the
form of the sensations, that is of _pure intuition_, Kant here appears
to fall into grave error. This arises from _his inexact idea_ of the
_essence of the aesthetic faculty or of art_, which, as we now know, is
pure intuition. He conceives the form of sensibility to be reducible to
the _two categories of space and time_.
Benedetto Croce has shown that space and time are far from being
categories or functions: they are complex posterior formations. Kant,
however, looked upon density, colour, etc., as material for sensations;
but the mind only observes colour or hardness when it has _already_
given a form to its sensations. Sensations, in so far as they are _crude
matter_, are _outside_ the mind: they are a _limit_. Colour, hardness,
density, etc., are _already_ intuitions. _They are the aesthetic
activity in its rudimentary manifestation._
Characterizing or qualifying imagination, that is, _aesthetic activity_,
should therefore _take the place occupied by the study of space and
time_ in the _Critique of Pure Reason_, and constitute the true
_Transcendental Aesthetic_, prologue to Logic.
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