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

450 Transcendental Dialectic son, it is supposed, is present in all the actions of man, in all circumstances of time, and always the same ; but it is itself never in time, never in a new state in which it was not before ; it is determining, never determined. We cannot ask, therefore, why reason has not determined itself differently, but only why it has not differently determined th.Q phenomena by its causality. And here no answer is really possible. For a different intelligible character would have given a different empirical character, and if we say that, in spite of the whole of his previous course of life, the offender could have avoided the lie, this only means that it was in the power of reason, and that reason, in its causality, is subject to no phenomenal and temporal conditions, and lastly, that the difference of time, though it makes a great difference in phenomena and their relation to each other, can, as these are neither things nor causes by themselves, produce no difference of action in reference to reason.

We thus see that, in judging of voluntary [p. 557] actions, we can, so far as their causality is concerned, get only so far as the intelligible cause, but not beyond. We can see that that cause is free, that it determines as independent of sensibility, and therefore is capable of being the sensuously unconditioned condition of phenomena. To explain why that intelligible character should, under present circumstances, give these phenomena and this empirical character, and no other, transcends all the powers of our reason, nay, all its rights of questioning, as if we were to ask why the transcendental object of our external sensuous intuition gives us intuition in space only and no other. But the problem which we have to solve does not require us to ask or to answer such questions. Our

Transcendental Dialectic 45 1

problem was, whether freedom is contradictory to natural necessity in one and the same action : and this we have sufficiently answered by showing that freedom may have relation to a very different kind of conditions from those of nature, so that the law of the latter does not affect the former, and both may exist independent of, and undisturbed by, each other.

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It should be clearly understood that, in what we have said, we had no intention of establishing the reality of freedom, as one of the faculties which contain [p. 558] the cause of the phenomenal appearances in our world of sense. For not only would this have been no transcendental consideration at all, which is concerned with concepts only, but it could never have succeeded, because from experience we can never infer anything but what must be represented in thought according to the laws of experience. It was not even our intention to prove the/<?^- sibility of freedom, for in this also we should not have succeeded, because from mere concepts a priori we can never know the possibility of any real ground or any causality. We have here treated freedom as a transcendental idea only, which makes reason imagine that it can absolutely begin the series of phenomenal conditions through what is sensuously unconditioned, but by which reason becomes involved in an antinomy with its own laws, which it had prescribed to the empirical use of the understanding. That this antinomy rests on a mere illusion, and that nature does not contradict the causality of freedom, that was the only thing which we could prove, and cared to prove.

452 Transcendental Dialectic

IV [p. 559]

Solution of the Cosmological Idea of the Totality of the Dependence of Phenomena^ with Regard to their Existence in General