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

1 It would be very easy to give to this argument the ordinary scholastic dress. But for my purposes it is sufficient to have clearly exhibited, even in a popular form, the ground on which it rests.

288 Transcendental Dialectic it would be impossible therefore to establish the necessity of the presupposition of a simple substance, the thought being composite. That, on the other hand, such a proposition might be established synthetically and entirely a priori from mere concepts, no one will venture to affirm who has once understood the grounds on which the possibility of synthetical propositions a priori rests, as explained by us before.

It is likewise impossible, however, to derive this necessary unity of the subject, as the condition of the possibility of the unity of every thought, from experience. For experience never supplies any necessity of thought, much less the concept of absolute unity. Whence then do we take that proposition on which the whole psychological syllogism of reason rests ?

It is manifest that if we wish to represent to ourselves a thinking being, we must put ourselves in its place, and supplant as it were the object which has to be considered by our own subject (which never happens in any [p. 354] other kind of investigation). The reason why we postulate for every thought absolute unity of the subject is because otherwise we could not say of it, I think (the manifold in one representation). Fpr although the whole of a thought may be divided and distributed under many subjects, the subjective I can never thus be divided and distributed, and it is this I which we presuppose in every thought.

As in the former paralogism therefore, so here also, the formal proposition of apperception, I think, remains the sole ground on which rational psychology ventures to undertake the extension of its knowledge. That proposition, however, is no experience, but only the form of

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apperception inherent in, and antecedent to, every experience, that is a purely subjective conditiofi^ having reference to a possible experience only, but by no means the condition of the possibility of the knowledge of objects, and by no means necessary to the concept of a thinking being in general ; although it must be admitted that we cannot represent to ourselves another intelligent being without putting ourselves in its place with that formula of our consciousness.

Nor is it true that the simplicity of my self (as a soul) is really deduced from the proposition, I think, for it is already involved in every thought itself. The proposition / am simple must be considered as the imme- [p. 355] diate expression of apperception, and the so-called syllogism of Cartesius, cogito, ergo simiy is in reality tautological, because cogito (sum cogitans) predicates reality immediately. I am simple TCiQ2iX\s wo more than that this representation of I does not contain the smallest trace of manifoldness, but is absolute (although merely logical) unity.

Thus we see that the famous psychological argument is founded merely on the indivisible unity of a representation, which only determines the verb with reference to a person ; and it is clear that the subject of inherence is designated transcendentally only by the I, which accompanies the thought, without our perceiving the smallest quality of it, in fact, without our knowing anything about it. It signifies a something in general (a transcendental subject) the representation of which must no doubt be simple, because nothing is determined in it, and nothing can be represented more simple than by the concept of a mere something. The simplicity however of the representation of a subject is not therefore a knowledge of the

290 Transcendental Dialectic simplicity of the subject, because no account whatever is taken of its quaUties when it is designated by the entirely empty expression I, an expression that can be applied to every thinking subject.