Because the ego produces this unconsciously, it appears
to be given, brought about by influence from without.
The second stage, “intuition,” is reached
when the ego reflects on sensation, when it opposes
to itself something foreign which limits it.
Thirdly, by reflection on intuition an “image”
of that which is intuited is constructed, and, as
such, distinguished from a real thing to which the
image corresponds; at this point the categories and
the forms of intuition, space and time, appear, which
thus arise along with the object.[1] The fourth stadium
is “understanding,” which steadies the
fluctuating intuition into a concept, realizes the
object, and looks upon it as the cause of the intuition.
Fifthly, “judgment” makes its appearance
as the faculty of free reflection and abstraction,
or the power to consider a definite content or to
abstract from it. As judgment is itself the condition
of the bound reflection of the understanding, so it
points in turn to its condition, to the sixth and
highest stage of intelligence, “reason,”
by means of which we are able to abstract from all
objects whatever, while reason itself, pure self-consciousness,
is that from which abstraction is never possible.
It is only in the highest stage that consciousness
or a representation of representation takes place.
And at the culmination of the theoretical ego the
point of transition to the practical ego appears.
Here the ego becomes aware that in positing itself
as determined by the non-ego it has only limited itself,
and therefore is itself the ground of the whole content
of consciousness; here it apprehends itself as determining
the non-ego or as acting, and recognizes as its chief
mission to impress the form of the ego as far as possible
on the non-ego, and ever to extend the boundary further.
[Footnote 1: The object is a product of the ego
only for the observer, not for the observed ego itself,
to which, from this standpoint of imagination, it
appears rather as a thing in itself independent of
the ego and affecting it. Further, it must so
appear, because the ego, in its after reflection on
its productive activity, and just by this reflection,
transforms the productive action considered into a
fixed and independent product found existing.]
The “deduction of representation” whose
outline has just been given was the first example
(often imitated in the school of Schelling and Hegel)
of a constructive psychology, which, from the
mission or the concept of the soul—in this
case from the nature of self-consciousness—deduces
the various psychical functions as a system of actions,
each of which is in its place implied by the rest,
as it in turn presupposes them. This is distinguished
from the sensationalistic psychology, which is also
genetic (cf. pp. 245-250), as well as from the mechanical
or associational psychology, which likewise excludes
the idea of an isolated coexistence of mental faculties,
by the fact that it demands a new manifestation of