Coffey: Senses and Intellect #3

More from Peter Coffey's Epistemology; Or the Theory of Knowledge follows. Coffey presents the scholastic theory of necessary judgments that he advocates.

"When, therefore, I reflect on my spontaneous assent to such a judgment as that 7 + 5 = 12, I observe the following facts: (a) that I affirm a necessary identity between predicate and subject; (b) that I affirm the identity after having seen it intellectually through comparison of the concept of "12" with the concept of  "7 + 5"; (c) that I affirm it because I have seen it. Moreover, I observe that (d) I see the necessary identity because I see that the concepts necessarily involve such identity [ ]" (Vol. 1, 234).

"How are the absolute necessity and universality of these relations to be accounted for? Manifestly these characteristics cannot appertain to any objects as perceived through sense experience, for they transcend the limits of sense experience. The necessity and universality in question are not empirical or a posteriori. They characterize objects not as perceived by sense but as conceived by intellect. The questions is, why or how is it that objects, as conceived, reveal such relations?
   "The answer is that the objects reveal those relations because intellect, in conceiving them, apprehends them in the abstract, i.e. divested of all the conditions of the contingent, actual, physical existence whereby alone they can be data or objects of sense experience. It apprehends them (in their essence or nature) as being independent of the limitations under which, in their sensible, physical, material existence, they come into sense experience: and because it so apprehends them it can and does see in them properties, laws, relations, which characterize their essences, their actual physical existence must necessarily and universally conform. And it is our intellectual intuition of these objects as involving such properties, laws, and relations, that gives us the absolutely necessary and universal judgment,--the judgment which is a priori in the sense that it is not grounded in sense experience [ ]" (Vol. 1, 241-2).

   "The abstractive and intuitive character of intellectual conception or thought is thus the key to the characters of necessity and universality in judgment of the ideal order. The intellect abstracts, as its proper objects, from the concrete, individual data or conscious sensation and reflection, the reality which constitutes the essences or nature of these data: these essences or natures it contemplates in this condition of abstraction in which they are static, changeless, self-identical entities: and thus it sees them to be characterized by properties and relations which, like themselves, are immutable necessary, eternal, etc." (Vol. 1, 243).

I believe there is merit in his making a sharp difference between sense and intellect, but it seems to me too sharp. I see conflict between the first and second excerpts. In the first he asserts the identity of  7 + 5 = 12 after having seen it, though intellectually. Yet in the second he asserts the judgment is not grounded in sense experience. How anyone could see that 7 + 5 = 12 is true intellectually without seeing it grounded in sense experience is incomprehensible to me. Indeed, such a claim is very much like Kant's, with which Coffey had earlier strongly disagreed.