Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason — trans. F. Max Müller

but 'with transcendental Dialectic, which is supposed to contain entirely a priori the origin of certain kinds of knowledge, arising from pure reason, and of certain deduced concepts, the object of which can never be given empirically, and which therefore lie entirely outside the domain of the pure understanding. We gathered from the natural relation which must exist between the transcendental and the logical use of our knowledge, in syllogisms as well as in judgments, that there must be three kinds of dialectic syllogisms, and no more, corresponding to the three kinds of conclusion by- which reason may from principles arrive at knowledge, and that in all of these it is the object of reason to ascend from the conditioned synthesis, to which the understanding is always restricted, to an unconditioned synthesis, which the understanding can never reach.

The relations which all our representations share in common are, ist, relation to the subject ; 2ndly, the relation to objects, either as phenomena, or as ob- [p. 334] jects of thought in general. If we connect this subdivision with the former division, we see that the relation of the representations of which we can form a concept or an idea can only be threefold : ist, the relation to the subject ; 2ndly, the relation to the manifold of the phenomenal object ; 3rdly, the relation to all things in general.

All pure concepts in general aim at a synthetical unity of representations, while concepts of pure reason (transcendental ideas) aim at unconditioned synthetical unity of all conditions. All transcendental ideas therefore can be arranged in three classes : the first containing the absolute (unconditioned) unity of the thinking subject ; the second the absolute unity of the series of conditions of

2/2 Ti'anscefidental Dialectic phenomena ; the third the absoUite imity of the condition of all objects of thought in general.

The thinking subject is the object-matter of psychology y the system of all phenomena (the world) the object-matter of cos7nology^ and the being which contains the highest condition of the possibility of all that can be thought (the Being of all beings), the object-matter of theology. Thus it is pure reason which supplies the idea of a transcendental science of the soul {psychologia rationalis), of a transcendental science of the world {cosmologia ratio7ialis) ^ and, lastly, o'f a transcendental science of God {theologia transcendehtalis). Even the mere plan of any [p. 335] one of these three sciences does not come from the understanding, even if connected with the highest logical use of reason, that is, with all possible conclusions, leading from one of its objects (phenomenon) to all others, and on to the most remote parts of any possible empirical synthesis, — but is altogether a pure and genuine product or rather problem of pure reason.

What kinds of pure concepts of reason are comprehended under these three titles of all transcendental ideas will be fully explained in the following chapter. They follow the thread of the categories, for pure reason never refers direct to objects, but to the concepts of objects framed by the understanding. Nor can it be rendered clear, except hereafter in a detailed explanation, how first, reason simply by the synthetical use of the same function which it employs for categorical syllogisms is necessarily led on to the concept of the absolute unity of the thinking subject ; secondly, how the logical procedure in hypothetical syllogisms leads to the idea of something absolutely unconditioned, in a series of given conditions, and how, thirdly,

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the mere form of the disjunctive syllogism produces necessarily the highest concept of reason, that of a Being of all beings ; a thought which, at first sight, seems extremely paradoxical. [p. 336]

No objective deduction, like that given of the categories, is possible with regard to these transcendental ideas ; they are ideas only, and for that very reason they have no relation to any object corresponding to them in experience. What we could undertake to give was a subjective deduction ^ of them from the nature of reason, and this has been given in the present chapter.