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

All concepts of pure psychology arise from [p. 345] these elements, simply by way of combination, and without the admixture of any other principle. This substance, taken simply as the object of the internal sense, gives us the concept of immateriality ; and as simple substance, that of incorruptibility ; its identity, as that of an intellectual substance, gives us personality ; and all these three together, spirituality ; its relation to objects in space gives us the concept of commercium (intercourse) with bodies ; the pure psychology thus representing the thinking substance as the principle of life in matter, that is, as soul {anima)^ and as the ground of animality ; which again, as restricted by spirituality, gives us the concept of immortality.

To these concepts refer four paralogisms of a transcen1 The reader, who may not guess at once the psychological purport of these transcendental and abstract terms, or understand why the latter attribute of the soul belongs to the category of existence, will find their full explanation and justification in the sequel. Moreover, I have to apologise for the many Latin expressions which, contrary to good taste, have crept in instead of their native equivalents, not only here, but throughout the whole of the work. My only excuse is, that I thought it better to sacrifice something of the elegance of language, rather than to throw any impediments in the way of real students, by the use of inaccurate and obscure expressions.

282 Transcendental Dialectic 3dental psychology, which is falsely supposed to be a science of pure reason, concerning the nature of our thinking being. We can, however, use as the foundation of such a science nothing but the single, and in itself perfectly empty, representation of the /, of which [p. 346] we cannot even say that it is a concept, but merely a consciousness that accompanies all concepts. By this /, or hcy or it (the thing), which thinks, nothing is represented beyond a transcendental subject of thoughts = x^ which is known only through the thoughts that are its predicates, and of which, apart from them, we can never have the slightest concept, so that we are really turning round it in a perpetual circle, having already to use its representation, before we can form any judgment about it. And this inconvenience is really inevitable, because consciousness in itself is not so much a representation, distinguishing a particular object, but really a form of representation in general, in so far as it is to be called knowledge, of which alone I can say that I think something by it.

It must seem strange, however, from the very beginning, that the condition under which I think, and which therefore is a property of my own subject only, should be valid at the same time for everything which thinks, and that, depending on a proposition which seems to be empirical, we should venture to found the apodictical and general judgment, namely, that everything which thinks is such as the voice of my own consciousness declares it to be within me. The reason of it is, that we are constrained to attribute a priori to things all the qualities which form the conditions, under which alone [p. 347] we are able to think them. Now it is impossible for me