A. Firstness
§1. The Source of the Categories 1)
300. The list of categories, or as Harris,2) the author of Hermes, called them, the »philosophical arrangements,« is a table of conceptions drawn from the logical analysis of thought and regarded as applicable to being. This description applies not merely to the list published by me in 1867,3) and which I here endeavor to amplify, but also to the categories of Aristotle and to those of Kant. The latter have been more or less modified by different critics, as Renouvier, and still more profoundly by Hegel. My own list grew originally out of the study of the table of Kant.
301. I shall not here inquire how far it is justifiable to apply the conceptions of logic to metaphysics. For I hold the importance of that question, great as it is, to be perhaps secondary, and at any rate not paramount to that of the question what such conceptions would be. I may say, however, that in my own opinion, each category has to justify itself by an inductive examination which will result in assigning to it only a limited or approximate validity.
