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

The following section, by showing their application, will place these observations in their proper light.

THE ANTINOMY OF PURE REASON Section IX

Of the Empirical Use of the Regulative Principle of Reason with Regard to all Cosmological Ideas

No transcendental use, as we have shown on several occasions, can be made of the concepts either of the understanding or of reason ; and the absolute totality of the series of conditions in the world of sense is due entirely to a transcendental use of reason, which demands this unconditioned completeness from what presupposes as a thing by itself. As no such thing is contained in the world of sense, we can never speak again [p. 516] of the absolute quantity of different series in it, whether they be limited or in themselves unlimited ; but the question can only be, how far, in the empirical regressus, we may go back in tracing experience to its conditions, in order to stop, according to the rule of reason, at no other answer of its questions but such as is in accordance with the object.

What therefore remains to us is only the validity of the principle of reason, as a rule for the continuation and for the extent of a possible experience, after its invalidity, as a constitutive principle of things by themselves, has been sufficiently established. If we have clearly established that invalidity, the conflict of reason with itself will be entirely finished, because not only has the illusion which led to that conflict been removed through critical analysis, but in its place the sense in which reason agrees with

420 Transcendental Dialectic 2itself, and the misapprehension of which was the only cause of conflict, has been clearly exhibited, and a principle formerly dialectical changed into a doctrinal one. In fact, if that principle, according to its subjective meaning, can be proved fit to determine the greatest possible use of the understanding in experience, as adequate to its objects, this would be the same as if it determined, as an axiom (which is impossible from pure reason), the [p. 517] objects themselves ^ /r/(?;7; for this also could not, with reference to the objects of experience, exercise a greater influence on the extension and correction of our knowledge, than proving itself efficient in the most extensive use of our understanding, as applied to experience.

Solution of the Cosmological Idea of the Totality of the Composition of PJienomena in an Universe

Here, as well as in the other cosmological problems, the regulative principle of reason is founded on the proposition that, in the empirical regressus, no experience of an absolute limit j that is, of any condition as such, which empirically is absolutely unconditioned, can exist. The ground of this is that such an experience would contain a limitation of phenomena by nothing or by the void, on which the continued regressus by means of experience must abut ; and this is impossible.

This proposition, which says that in an empirical regressus I can only arrive at the condition which itself must be considered empirically conditioned, [p. 518] contains the rule i^i terminis, that however far I may

have reached in the ascending series, I must always enquire for a still higher member of that series, whether it be known to me by experience or not.