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

1 Though we cannot answer the question, what kind of quahty a transcendental object may possess, or tvhat it is^ we are well able to answer that the question itself is nothings because it is without an object. All questions, therefore, of transcendental psychology are answerable, and have been answered, for they refer to the transcendental subject of all internal phenomena, which itself is not phenomenal, and not given as an object, and possesses none of the conditions which make any of the categories (and it is to them that the question really refers) applicable to it. We have, therefore, here a case where the common saying applies, that no answer is as good as an answer, that is, that the question regarding the quality of something which cannot be conceived by any definite predicates, being completely beyond the sphere of objects, is entirely null and void.

392 Transcendental Dialectic by itself, it is impossible that the answer of the transcendent cosmological question can be anywhere but in the idea, because it refers to no object by itself; and in respect to possible experience we do not ask for that which can be given in co?icreto in any experience, but for that which lies in the idea, to which the empirical synthesis can no more than approach. Hence that question can be solved from the idea only, and being a mere creation of reason, reason cannot decline her responsibility and put it on the unknown object.

It is in reality not so strange as it may seem [p. 480] at first, that a science should demand and expect definite answers to all the questions belonging to it {qicaestiones domesticae)y although at present these answers have not yet been discovered. There are, in addition to transcendental philosophy, two other sciences of pure reason, the one speculative, the other practical, pure mathematics, and pare ethics. Has it ever been alleged that, it may be on account of our necessary ignorance of the conditions, it must remain uncertain what exact relation the diameter bears to a circle, in rational or irrational numbers.-* As by the former the relation cannot be expressed adequately, and by the latter has not yet been discovered, it was judged rightly that the impossibility at least of the solution of such a problem can be known with certainty, and Lambert gave even a demonstration of this. In the general principles of morality there can be nothing uncertain, because its maxims are either entirely null and void, or derived from our own rational concepts only. In natural science, on the contrary, we have an infinity of conjectures with regard to which certainty can never be expected, because natural phenomena are objects given

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to us independent of our concepts, and the key to them cannot be found within our own mind, but in the world outside us. For that reason it cannot in many cases be found at all, and a satisfactory answer must not be expected. The questions of the transcendental [p. 481] Analytic, referring to the deduction of our pure knowledge, do not belong to this class, because we are treating at present of the certainty of judgments with reference to their objects only, and not with reference to the origin of our concepts themselves.

We shall not, therefore, be justified in evading the obligation of a critical solution, at least of the questions of reason, by complaints on the narrow limits of our reason, and by confessing, under the veil of humble self-knowledge, that it goes beyond the powers of our reason to determine whether the world has existed from eternity, or has had a beginning ; whether cosmical space is filled with beings ad infinitum^ or enclosed within certain limits ; whether anything in the world is simple, or everything can be infinitely divided ; lastly, whether there is a Being entirely unconditioned and necessary in itself, or whether the existence of everything is conditioned, and therefore externally dependent, and in itself contingent. For all these questions refer to an object which can be found nowhere except in our own thoughts, namely, the absolutely unconditioned totality of the synthesis of phenomena. If we are not able to say and establish anything certain about this from our own concepts, we must not throw the blame on the [p. 482] object itself as obscure, because such an object (being nowhere to be found, except in our ideas) can never be given to us ; but we must look for the real cause of

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