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

to form the smallest representation of a thinking being by any external experience, but I can do it through self-consciousness only. Such objects therefore are nothing but a transference of my own consciousness to other things, which thus, and thus only, can be represented as thinking beings. The proposition / tJii7ik is used in this case, however, as problematical only ; not so far as it may contain the perception of an existence (the Cartesian, cogito, ergo Slim), but with regard to its mere possibility, in order to see what properties may be deduced from such a simple proposition with regard to its subject, whether such subject exists or not.

If our knowledge of thinking beings in general, so far as it is derived from pure reason, were founded on more than the cogito, and if we made use at the same time of observations on the play of our thoughts and the natural laws of the thinking self, derived from them, we should have before us an empirical psychology, which would form a kind of physiology of the internal sense, and perhaps explain its manifestations, but would never help us to understand such properties as do not fall under any possible experience (as, for instance, simplicity), or to teach apodictically anything touching the nature of thinking beings in general. It would not therefore be a rational psychology. ^

As the proposition / thittk (taken problemati- [p. 348] cally) contains the form of every possible judgment of the understanding, and accompanies all categories as their vehicle, it must be clear that the conclusions to be drawn from it can only contain a transcendental use of the understanding, which declines all admixture of experience, and of the achievements of which, after what has been said before, we cannot form any very favourable anticipations.

284 Transcendental Dialectic

We shall therefore follow it, with a critical eye, through all the predicaments of pure psychology.^

\^TJie First Paralogism of Substantiality

That the representation of which is the absolute subject of our judgments, and cannot be used therefore as the determination of any other thing, is the substance.

I, as a thinking being, am the absolute subject of all my possible judgments, and this representation of myself can never be used as the predicate of any other thing.

Therefore I, as a thinking being (Soul), am Sttbstance.

Criticisfn of the First Paralogisjn of Pitre'^ Psychology

We showed in the analytical portion of transcendental logic, that pure categories, and among them that of substance, have in themselves no objective meaning, unless they rest on some intuition, and are applied to [p. 349] the manifold of such intuitions as functions of synthetical unity. Without this they are merely functions of a judgment without contents. I may say of everything, that it is a substance, so far as I distinguish it from what are mere predicates and determinations. Now in all our thinking the I is the subject, in which thoughts are inherent as determinations only ; nor can that I ever be used as a determination of any other thing. Thus everybody is constrained to look upon himself as the substance, and on thinking as the accidents only of his being, and determi> nations of his state.

1 All that follows from here to the beginning of the second chapter, is left out in the Second Edition, and replaced by Supplement XXVII.

2 Afterwards transcendetital instead, of pure.

Transcendental Dialectic 285

But what use are we to make of such a concept of a substance ? That I, as a thinking being, continue for myself, and naturally neither arise noY peris h^ is no legitimate deduction from it ; and yet this conclusion would be the only advantage that could be gained from the concept of the substantiality of my own thinking -subject, and, but for that, I could do very well without it.