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

reason, that distinction becomes important, and opens to us an entirely new insight into the character of the suit in which reason is implicated. That suit had before been dismissed, as resting on both sides on wrong presuppositions. Now, however, as there seems to be in the dy- [p. 530] namical antinomy such a presupposition as may be compatible with the pretensions of reason, and as the judge himself supplies perhaps the deficiency of legal grounds, which had been misunderstood on both sides, the suit may possibly be adjusted, from this point of view, to the satisfaction of both parties, which was impossible in the conflict of the mathematical antinomy.

If we merely look to the extension of the series of conditions, and whether they are adequate to the idea, or whether the idea is too large or too small for them, the series are no doubt all homogeneous. But the concept of the understanding on which these ideas are founded contains either a synthesis of the homogeneons only (which is presupposed in the composition as well as the decomposition of every quantity), or of the heterogeneous also, which must at least be admitted as possible in the dynamical synthesis, both in a causal connection, and in the connection of the necessary with the contingent.

Thus it happens that none but sensuous conditions can enter into the mathematical connection of the series of phenomena, that is, conditions which themselves are part of the series ; while the dynamical series of sensuous conditions admits also of a heterogeneous condition, which is not a part of the series, but, as merely intelligible, outside it ; so that a certain satisfaction is given to reason [p. 531] by the unconditioned being placed before the phenomena, without disturbing the series of the phenomena, which

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must always be conditioned, or breaking it off, contrary to the principles of the understanding.

Owing to the dynamical ideas admitting of a condition of the phenomena outside their series, that is, a condition which itself is not a phenomenon, something arises which is totally different from the result of the mathematical ^ antinomy. The result of that antinomy was, that both the contradictory dialectical statements had to be declared false. The throughout conditioned character, however, of the dynamical series, which is inseparable from them as phenomena, if connected with the empirically unconditioned, but at the same time not sensiLoiis condition, may give satisfaction to the understanding on one, and the reason on the other side,^ because the dialectical arguments which, in some way or other, required unconditioned totality in mere phenomena, vanish; while the [p. 532] propositions of reason, if thus amended, may both be true. This cannot be the case with the cosmological ideas, which refer only to a mathematically unconditioned unity, because with them no condition can be found in the series of phenomena which is not itself a phenomenon, and as such constitutes one of the links of the series.

1 Mathematical, omitted in the First and Second Editions.

2 The understanding admits of no condition among phenomena^ which should itself be empirically unconditioned. But if we might conceive an intelligible condition, that is to say, a condition, not belonging itself as a link to the series of phenomena, of something conditioned (as a phenomenon) without in the least interrupting the series of empirical conditions, such a condition might be admitted as empirically unconditioned, without interfering with the empirical continuous regressus.

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III

Solution of the Cosmological Ideas with Regard to the Totality of the Derivation of Cosmical Events from their Causes

We can conceive two kinds of causality only with reference to events, causality either of nature or of freedom. .The former is the connection of one state in the world of sense with a preceding state, on which it follows according to a rule. As the causality of phenomena depends on conditions of time, and as the preceding state, if it had always existed, could not have produced an effect, which first takes place in time, it follows that the causality of the cause of that which happens or arises must, according to the principle of the understanding, have itself arisen and require a cause.

By freedom, on the contrary, in its cosmo- [p. 533] logical meaning, I understand the faculty of beginning a state spontaneously. Its causality, therefore, does not depend, according to the law of nature, on another cause, by which it is determined in time. In this sense freedom is a purely transcendental idea, which, first, contains nothing derived from experience, and, secondly, the object of which cannot be determined in any experience ; because it is a general rule, even of the possibility of all experienccy that everything which happens has a cause, and that therefore the causality also of the cause, which itself has happened or arisen, must again have a cause. In this manner the whole field of experience, however far it may extend, has been changed into one great whole of nature. As, however, it is impossible in this way to arrive at an abTraiiscendental Dialectic 433