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

From such perceptions, whether by mere play of fancy or by experience, knowledge of objects can be produced, and here no doubt deceptive representations may arise, without truly corresponding objects, the deception being due, either to illusions of imagination (in dreams), or to a fault of judgment (the so-called deceptions of the senses). In order to escape from these false appearances, one has to follow the rule that, whatever is connected according to empirical laws with a perception, is real. This kind of illusion, however, and its prevention, concerns idealism as well as dualism, since it affects the form of experience only. In order to refute empirical idealism and its unfounded misgivings as to the objective reality of our external perceptions, it is sufficient to consider that external perception proves immediately a reality in space, which space, though in itself a mere form of [p. 377] representations, possesses nevertheless objective reality with respect to all external phenomena (which themselves are mere representations only) ; that without perception, even the creations of fancy and dreams would not be posX

3o6 Transcendental Dialectic sible, so that our external senses, with reference to the data from which experience can spring, must have real objects corresponding" to them in space.

There are two kinds of idealists, the dogmatic^ who denies the existence of matter, and the sceptical^ who doubts it, because he thinks it impossible to prove it. At present we have nothing to do with the former, who is an idealist, because he imagines he finds contradictions in the possibility of matter in general. This is a difficulty which we shall have to deal with in the following section on dialectical syllogisms, treating of reason in its internal struggle with reference to the concepts of the possibility of all that belongs to the connection of experience. The sceptical idealist, on the contrary, who attacks only the ground of our assertion, and declares our conviction of the existence of matter, which we founded on immediate perception, as insufficient, is in reality a benefactor of human reason, because he obliges us, even in the smallest matter of common experience, to keep our eyes well [p. 378] open, and not to consider as a well-earned possession what may have come to us by mistake only. We now shall learn to understand the great advantage of these idealistic objections. They drive us by main force, unless we mean to contradict ourselves in our most ordinary propositions, to consider all perceptions, whether we call them internal or external, as a consciousness only of what affects our sensibility, and to look on the external objects of them, not as things by themselves, but only as representations of which, as of every other representation, we can become immediately conscious, and which are called external, because they depend on what we call the external sense with its intuition of space, space being itself nothing but

Transceridental Dialectic 307

an internal kind of representation in which certain perceptions become associated.

If we were to admit external objects to be things by themselves, it would be simply impossible to understand how we can arrive at a knowledge of their reality outside us, considering that we always depend on representations which are inside us. It is surely impossible that we should feel outside us, and not inside us, and the whole of our self-consciousness cannot give us anything but our own determinations. Thus sceptical idealism forces us to take refuge in the only place that is left to us, namely, in the ideality of all phenomena : the very ideality which, though as yet unprepared for its consequences, we established in our own transcendental Esthetic. If [p. 379] then we ask whether, consequently, dualism only must be admitted in psychology, we answer, certainly, but only in its empirical acceptation. In the connection of experience matter, as the substance of phenomena, is really given to the external sense in the same manner as the thinking I, likewise as the substance of phenomena, is given to the internal sense; and it is according to the rules which this category introduces into the empirical connection of our external as well as internal perceptions, that phenomena on both sides must be connected among themselves. If, on the contrary, as often happens, we were to extend the concept of dualism and take it in its transcendental acceptation, then neither it, nor on one side Xh.Q pneutnatism, or on the other side the materialisniy which are opposed to dualism, would have the smallest foundation ; we should have missed the determination of our concepts, and have mistaken the difference in our mode of representing objects, which, with regard to what

3o8 Transcende7ital Dialectic