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

I have called the ideas, which we are at present discussing, cosmological, partly because we understand by world the totality of all phenomena, our ideas being directed to that only which is unconditioned among the phenomena; partly, because world, in its transcendental meaning, denotes the totality of all existing things, and we are concerned only with the completeness of the synthesis (although properly only in the regressus to the [p. 420] conditions). Considering, therefore, that all these ideas are transcendent because, though not transcending in kind their object, namely, phenomena, but restricted to the world of sense (and excluded from all noumena) they nevertheless carry synthesis to a degree which transcends all possible experience, they may, according to my opinion, very properly be called cosmical concepts. With reference to the distinction, however, between the mathematically or the dynamically unconditioned at which the regressus aims, I might call the two former, in a narrower sense, cosmical concepts (macrocosmically or microcosmically) and the remaining two transcendent concepts of nature. This distinction, though for the present of no great consequence, may become important hereafter.

THE ANTINOMY OF PURE REASON Section II

If every collection of dogmatical doctrines is called The tic, I may denote by Antithetic, not indeed dogmatical

340 Transcendental Dialectic 2assertions of the opposite, but the conflict between different kinds of apparently dogmatical knowledge {thesis cum antithesi), to none of which we can ascribe [p. 421] a superior claim to our assent. This antithetic, therefore, has nothing to do with one-sided assertions, but considers general knowledge of reason with reference to the conflict only that goes on in it, and its causes. The transcendental antithetic is in fact an investigation of the antinomy of pure reason, its causes and its results. If we apply our reason, not only to objects of experience, in order to make use of the principles of the understanding, but venture to extend it beyond the limit of experience, there arise rationalising or sophistical propositions, which can neither hope for confirmation nor need fear refutation from experience. Every one of them is not only in itself free. from contradiction, but can point to conditions of its necessity in the nature of reason itself, only that, unfortunately, its opposite can produce equally valid and necessary grounds for its support.

The questions which naturally arise in such a Dialectic of pure reason are the following, i. In what propositions is pure reason inevitably subject to an antinomy.-^ 2. On what causes does this antinomy depend.^ 3. Whether, and in what way, reason may, in spite of this contradiction, find a way to certainty }

A dialectical proposition of pure reason must have this characteristic to distinguish it from all purely sophistical propositions, fij^st, that it does not refer to a [p. 422] gratuitous question, but to one which human reason in its natural progress must necessarily encounter, and, secondly, that it, as well as its opposite, carries with itself not a merely artificial illusion, which when once seen through