Methods which presuppose the literal unity of the book; II.
The pilgrimages of Christianity presuppose the existence of those of paganism; origin.
The absence of direct testimony can be partially supplied by later events which presuppose the break-up of no inconsiderable state, and imply relations with Samaria which had been by no means so unfriendly as the historians represent.
Occam, on the other hand, maintains in the spirit of Hobbes that the act of abstraction does not presuppose any activity of the understanding or will, but is a spontaneous secondary process by which the first act (perception) or the state it leaves behind (habitus derelictus ex primo actu = Hobbes's " decaying sense ") is naturally followed, as soon as two or more similar representations are present.
Kant perceives that " perception without conception is blind, conception without perception is empty," but if he goes so far ought he not to have gone still further and inquired whether there can be any perception at all without a concept, any concept which does not presuppose a precept, and, if this is impossible, whether the distinction between a world of appearance which is known and a world of things-in-themselves which is not, is not illusory ?