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

400 Transcendental Dialectic if a ball cannot pass through a hole. In this case it is indifferent what expression we use, because we do not know which of the two exists for the sake of the other. But you would never say that the man is too large for his coat, but that the coat is too small for the man.

We have thus been led at least to a well-founded suspicion that the cosmological ideas, and with them all the conflicting sophistical assertions, may rest on an empty and merely imaginary conception of the manner in which the object of those ideas can be given, and this suspicion may lead us on the right track to discover the illusion which has so long led us astray.

THE ANTINOMY OF PURE REASON

Section VI

Transcendental Idealism as the Key to the Solution of Cosmological Dialectic

It has been sufficiently proved in the transcendental -Esthetic that everything which is perceived in space and time, therefore all objects of an experience possible to us, are nothing but phenomena, that is, mere representations which, such as they are represented, namely, as [p. 491] extended beings, or series of changes, have no independent existence outside our thoughts. This system I call Transcendental Idealism} Transcendental realism changes these modifications of our sensibility into selfsubsistent things, that is, it changes mere representations into things by themselves.

1 See Supplement XXVIII.

Ti^a7tscendental Dialectic 401

It would be unfair to ask us to adopt that long-decried empirical idealism which, while it admits the independent reality of space, denies the existence of extended beings in it, or at all events considers it as doubtful and does not admit that there is in this respect a sufficiently established difference between dream and reality.

It sees no difficulty with regard to the phenomena of the internal sense in time, being real things ; nay, it even maintains that this internal experience alone sufficiently proves the real existence of its object (by itself), with all the determinations in time.

Our own transcendental idealism, on the contrary, allows that the objects of external intuition may be real, as they are perceived in space, and likewise all changes in time, as they are represented by the internal sense. For as space itself is a form of that intuition which we call external, and as there would be no empirical repre- [p. 492] sentation at all, unless there were objects in space, we can and must admit the extended beings in it as real ; and the same applies to time. Space itself, however, as well as time, and with them all phenomena, are not things by themselves, but representations, and cannot exist outside our mind ; and even the internal sensuous intuition of our mind (as an object of consciousness) which is represented as determined by the succession of different states in time, is not a real self, as it exists by itself, or what is called the transcendental subject, but a phenomenon only, given to the sensibility of this to us unknown being. It cannot be admitted that this internal phenomenon exists as a thing by itself, because it is under the condition of time, which can never be the determination of anything by itself. In space and time, however, the empirical truth of phenomena

2D

402 Transcendental Dialectic is sufficiently established, and kept quite distinct from a dream, if both are properly and completely connected together in experience, according to empirical laws.