Abstract

Before surveying examples of Kant's transcendental psychologism, it may prove helpful to return to the model after which they are patterned: Hume's associationism. Contrary to what is often supposed, Hume did not confine his enquiries into representational origins to what exists in the mind prior to and independently of association. When the materials available pre-associationally are insufficient to yield an idea able to perform a certain prescribed function in human thought and reasoning, he then typically looked to the actions and affects of the associating imagination itself as the sources of the missing elements. The idea of cause and effect is the locus classicus. The pre-eminent function of this idea is to extend the mind's purview ‘beyond our senses’ and inform ‘us of existences and objects, which we do not see or feel’ 74)