Coffey Critiques Kant #1

I have been reading Peter Coffey's 2-volume Epistemology; Or the Theory of Knowledge (#1, #2), first published in 1917. Coffey was an Irish Roman Catholic priest and Neoscholastic philosopher. He often critiques Immanuel Kant's ideas in these volumes. I tip my hat to George H. Smith for recommending this work (link).

In his Critique of Pure Reason Kant famously posited space and time as "pure intuitions" and "forms of sensibility that are a priori necessary conditions for any possible experience" that the mind imposes upon experience. In Volume 2, Chapter XXI Coffey calls Kant's doctrine confused and ambiguous.

When Kant tried removing from 'the representation of a body' all that belongs to conception and all that belongs to to sensation, he says "there remains something of that empirical intuition, viz. extension and form" that belong to the perceived body. Coffey writes: "Yet in the very next sentence he says that it belongs to 'pure intuition, which a priori . . . exists in the mind as a mere form of sensibility'. But he does not say whether it belongs to this 'pure intuition' as its form, i.e. as a general mode or power of perceiving, or rather as identical with the the actual pure a priori intuition itself ; because he confounds the 'form' of pure intuition with the actual intuition of empty space."

"Now if Kant meant by 'forms of intuition,' consistently and exclusively, mental capacities or powers of apprehending what we become aware of as being endowed with this, that, or the other quality, then of course it is true that the mind has such 'forms,' and has them a priori: in other words, it is true that the mind, in order to become aware of anything as e.g. hard, or cold, or white, or bitter, or loud, or sweet-smelling, or extended, or moving, etc., must have, as a prerequisite condition for such actual perceptions, the corresponding mental capacities or powers of perception. But in that case we should say that there are not merely two a priori forms of sense perception, but as many as there are distinct perceptible sense qualities in physical nature; and the two forms whereby we apprehend the qualities, space and time, we should not call space and time, but forms of our perception of space and time. Kant, however, contends that all the other sense qualities, except space and time, belong to the mental material of perception, viz. to sensations while sense and time alone are mental forms of perception" (p. 188-9).