CATEGORIES. This designation has come down to iis from Aristotle. One of the books of his Organon or Logical System is so named. Tlie C., or predicaments, as the schoolmen called them, are to be understood as an attempt at a comprehensive classifica tion of all that exists, for the purposes of logical affirmation, proof, or disproof. Tlie entire universe may be classified in various ways—as into things celestial and terrestrial; into matter and spirit; into organized and unorganized; into minerals, plants, animals, etc. But the classification contemplated under the C. proceeds on the very general properties or attributes that most extensively pervade all existing things, although in unequal degrees. A good example is quantity, which pertains to every thing that we know or can think of. We give the Aristotelian enumeration—the first column is the Mr. J. S. Mill has the following remarks on the above scheme: " The imperfections of this classification are too obvious to require, and its merits are not sufficient to reward. a minute examination. It is a mere catalogue of the distinctions rudely marked out by the language of familiar life, with little or no attempt to penetrate, by philosophical analysis, to the rationale even of these common distinctions. Such an analysis, how ever superficially conducted, would have shown the enumeration to be both redundant and defective. Some objects are admitted, and others repeated several times under different heads. It is like a division of animals into men, quadrupeds, horses, asses, and ponies. That, for instance, could not be a very comprehensive view of the nature of Relation, which could exclude action, passivity, and local situation from that cate gory. The saine observation applies to position in time and position in space; while the distinction between the latter and situation is merely book i., chap. iii. 1. Sonic writers have endeavored to save the C. from these objections, by declaring that the fourth, Relation, is to be looked upon as a general head, comprehending the remaining six under it. But there is no evidence that Aristotle had this view in his mind; on the contrary, it appears almost certain that his idea of Relation was too nar row and limited to admit of his giving it so great a comprehension.
Mr. 31111 giies us the result of his own analysis, the following enumeration and classification of existences or describable things: 1. Feelings, or states of consciousness; which are the most comprehensive experience that the human mind can attain to, since even the external world is only known as con ceived by our minds.
2. The minds which experience those feelings.
3. The bodies, or external objects, which are supposed to excite all that class of feelings that we denominate sensations.
4. The successions, and coexistences, the likenesses and unlikenesses, between feel ings or states of consciousness. Although the relations are considered by us to subsist between the bodies, or things, external to our minds, we are driven in the last resort to consider them as really subsisting. between the states of each one's own individual mind.
Mr. Mill shows that all possible propositions—and it is with the truth or falsehood of propositions that the science of logic has chiefly to do—affirm or deny one or other of the following properties or facts: Existence—the most general attribute of all—Co-ex istence, sequence or succession, causation—a peculiar case of succession—and resem blance. It is to arrive at this classification of propositions, for the purposes of logic, that the foregoing analysis, corresponding to the Aristotelian C., was made. The properties affirmed of any thing or things, or the things of which any properties are affirmed, come under some one or other of the four beads above given.
The C. of Kant, which are sometimes brought into comparison with those of Aristo tle, are conceived under a totally different point of view. See sir W. Hamilton's Dis oussions on Philosophy, 2d edit., p. 26. They refer to certain forms supposed to be inherent in the understanding itself, under which the mind embraces the objects of actual experience. The Kantian philosophy supposes that human knowledge is partly made up of the sensations of outward things—color, sound, touch. etc.—and partly of intuitions existing in the mind prior to all experience of the actual world. This is the point of difference between the school of Locke—who rejected all innate ideas, concep tions, or forms—and the :chool of Kant. No such question was raised under the Aris totelian categories. - Kant's enumeration of his innate forms is as follows: 1. Quantity, including unity, multitude, totality; 2. Quality, including reality, negation, limitation: 3. Relation, including substance and accident, cause and effect, action and reaction; 4. Modality, which includes possibility, existence, necessity. These indicate the elements of our knowledge a priori; it being the opinion of the author, that such notions, as cau sation, necessity, etc., cannot be obtained from the exercise of our senses and intelligence upon the world of realities, but must have been somehow or other imprinted upon the mind originally.