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

elements, although their connection in space, by which they become a body, should have been removed. But, what applies to a thing by itself, represented by a pure concept of the understanding, does not apply to what is called substance, as a phenomenon. This is not an absolute subject, but only a permanent image of sensibility, nothing in fact but intuition, [p. 526] in which nothing unconditioned can ever be met with. But although this^ rule of the progress in infinitum applies without any doubt to the subdivision of a phenomenon, as a mere occupant of space, it does not apply to the number of the parts, separated already in a certain way in a given whole, which thus constitute a quantnm discretiun. To suppose that in every organised whole every part is again organised, and that by thus dissecting the parts in infinitwn we should meet again and again with new organised parts, in fact that the whole is organised in infifiitnjn, is a thought difficult to think, though it is possible to think that the parts of matter decomposed in infinitum might become organised. For the infinity of the division of a given phenomenon in space is founded simply on this, that by it divisibility only, that is, an entirely indefinite number of parts, is given, while the parts themselves can only be given and determined through the subdivision, in short, that the whole is not itself already divided. Thus the division can determine a number in it, which goes so far as we like to go, in the regressus of a division. In an organic body, on the contrary, organised in infinit^^'^n the whole is by that very concept represented as [p. 527] divided, and a number of parts, definite in itself, and yet infinite, is found in it, before every regressus of division.

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This would be self-contradictory, because we should have to consider this infinite convolute as a never-to-be-completed series (infinite), and yet as complete in its (organised) comprehension. Infinite division takes the phenomenon only as a quantum continuum, and is inseparable from the occupation of space, because in this very occupation lies the ground of endless divisibility. But as soon as anything is taken as a qua?itum discretum^ the number of units in it is determined, and therefore at all times equal to a certain number. How far the organisation in an organised body may go, experience alone can show us ; but though it never arrived with certainty at any unorganised part, they would still have to be admitted as lying within possible experience. It is different with the transcendental division of a phenomenon. How far that may extend is not a matter of experience, but a principle of reason, which never allows us to consider the empirical regressus in the decomposition of extended bodies, according to the nature of these phenomena, as at any time absolutely completed.

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Concluding Remarks on the Solution of the [p. 528] Transcendental -mathematical Ideas, and Preliminary Remark for the Solution of the Transcendental-dynainical Ideas

When exhibiting in a tabular form the antinomy of pure reason, through all the transcendental ideas, and indicating the ground of the conflict and the only means of removing it, by declaring both contradictory statements as false, we always represented the conditions as belonging to that which they conditioned, according to relations

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of space and time, this being the ordinary supposition of the common understanding, and in fact the source from which that conflict arose. In that respect all dialectical representations of the totality in a series of conditions of something given as conditioned were always of the same character. It was always a series in which the condition was connected with the conditioned, as members of the same series, both being thus homogeneous. In such a series the regressus was never conceived as completed, or, if that had to be done, one of the members, being in itself conditioned, had wrongly to be accepted as the first, and therefore as unconditioned. If not always the object, that is, the conditioned, yet the series of its conditions was always considered according [p. 529] to quantity only, and then the difficulty arose (which could not be removed by any compromise, but only by cutting the knot), that reason made it either too long or too short for the understanding, which could in neither case come up to the idea.

But in this we have overlooked an essential distinction between the objects, that is, the concepts of the understanding, which reason tries to raise into ideas. Two of them, according to the above table of the categories, imply a mathematical^ the remaining two a dynamical synthesis of phenomena. Hitherto this overlooking was of no great importance, because, in the general representation of all transcendental ideas, we always remained under phenomenal conditions, and with regard to the two transcendental-mathematical ideas also, we had to do with no object but the phenomenal only. Now, however, as we have come to consider the dynamical concepts of the understanding, so far as they should be rendered adequate to the idea of

430 Transcendental Dialectic