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

Humanity (as an idea), in its complete perfection, implies not only all essential qualities belonging to human nature, which constitute our concept of it, enlarged to a degree of complete agreement with the highest aims that would represent our idea of perfect humanity, but everything also which, beside this concept, is required for the complete determination of the idea. For of all contradictory predicates one only can agree with the idea of the most perfect man. What to us is an i^^l, was in Plato's language an Idea of a divine mind, an individual object present to its pure intuition, the most perfect of every kind of possible-beings, and the-archetype of all phenomenal copies.

Without soaring so high, we have to admit [p. 569] that human reason contains not only ideas, but ideals also, which though they have not, like those of Plato, creative, yet have certainly practical power (as regulative principles), and form the basis of the possible perfection of certain acts. Moral concepts are not entirely pure concepts of reason, because they rest on something empirical, pleasure or pain. Nevertheless, with regard to the principle by which reason imposes limits on freedom, which in itself is without laws, these moral concepts (with regard to their form at least) may well serve as examples of pure concepts of reason. Virtue and human wisdom in its perfect purity are ideas, while the wise man (of the Stoics) is an ideal, that is, a man existing in thought only, but in complete agreement with the idea of wisdom. While the idea gives rnlesfthe ideal serves as the archetype for the permanent determination of the copy ; and we jiave no

other rule of our actions but the-Conduct of that divine 2man within us, with which we compare ourselves, and by which wejudge^nd beUcLPU^r^^^^^^ though we. can never reach it. These i^e^Js, though they cannot claim objective reality (existence), are not therefore to be considered as mere chimeras, but supply reason with an indispensable standard, because it requires the concept ofThat which is perfect of its kind, in order to estimate and [p. 570] measure by it thejlegree and the number of the defects in the imperfectj To attempt to realise the ideal in an example, that is, as a real phenomenon, as we might represent a perfectly wise man in a novel, is impossible, nay, absurd, and but little encouraging, because the natural limits, which are constantly interfering with the perfection in the idea, make all illusion in such an experiment impossible, and thus render the good itself in the idea suspicious and unreal.

This is the case with the ideal__^£j'eason, whidx-xoiiaL always rest on definite concepts, and serve as rule and model, whether for imitation or for criticism. The case is totally different with those creations of our imagination of which it is impossible to give an intelligible concept, or say anything, — which are in fact a kind of monogram^ consisting of single lines without any apparent rule, a vague outline rather of different experiences than a definite image, such as painters and physiognomists pretend to carry in their heads, and of which they speak as a kind of vague shadow only of their creations and criticisms that can never be communicated to others. They may be termed, though improperly, ideals of sensibility, because they are meant to be the never-attainable model of possible empirical intuitions, and yet fur-

462 Tra7iscendental Dialectic 3nish no rule capable of being explained or ex- [p. 571] amined.

In its i^|l, on the_contrary, reason aimsL^t_a perfect determinationj^according tommies a priori, ^.nd it conceives an object ^throughout determinable according to principles, though without the sufficient conditions of experience, so that the concept itself is transcendent.

Every concept is, with regard to that which is not contained in it, undetermined and subject to the principle of determinability, according to which of every tzvo contradictorily opposite predicates, one only can belong to it. This rests on the principle of contradiction, and is therefore a purely logical principle, taking no account of any of the contents of our knowledge, and looking only to its logical form.

Besides this everything is subject, in its possibility, to the principle of complete determination, according to which one of all the possible predicates of things, as compared with their opposites, must be applicable [p. 572] to it. This does not rest only on the principle of contradiction, for it regards everything, not only in relation to two contradictory predicates, but in relation to the ivJiole possibility, that is, to the whole of all predicates of things, and, presupposing these as a condition a priori, it represents everything as deriving its own possibility from the