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

If, therefore, our reason postulates a transcendental substratum for all determinations, a substratum which contains, as it were, the whole store of material whence all possible predicates of things may be taken, we shall find that such a substratum is nothing but the idea of the sum total of reality {pmnitiido realitatis). In [p. 576] that case all true negations are nothing but limitations which they could not be unless there were the substratum of the unlimited (the All).

By this complete possession of all reality we represent the concept of a thing by itself diS> completely determined, and the concept of an ens realissimum is the concept of individual being, because of all possible opposite predicates one, namely, that which absolutely belongs to being, is found in its determination. It is therefore a transcendental ideal which forms the foundations of the complete

^ The observations and calculations of astronomers have taught us much that is wonderful; but the most important is, that they have revealed to us the abyss of our ignorance, which otherwise human reason could never have conceived so great. To meditate on this must produce a great change in the determination of the aims of our reason.

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466 Transcendental Dialectic determination which is necessary for all that exists, and which constitutes at the same time the highest and complete condition of its possibility, to which all thought of objects, with regard to their content, must be traced back. It is at the same time the only true ideal of which human reason is capable, because it is in this case alone that a concept of a thing, which in itself is general, is completely determined by itself, and recognised as the representation of an individual.

The logical determination of a concept by reason is based upon a disjunctive syllogism in which the major contains a logical division (the division of the sphere of a general concept), while the minor limits that sphere to a certain part, and the conclusion determines the concept by that part. The general concept of a reality [p. 577] in general cannot be divided a priori, because without experience we know no definite kinds of reality contained under that genus. Hence the transcendental major of the complete determination of all things is nothing but a representation of the sum total of all reality, and not only a concept which comprehends all predicates, according to their transcendental content, under itself, but within itself; and the complete determination of everything depends on the limitation of this total of reality, of which some part is ascribed to the thing, while the rest is excluded from it, a procedure which agrees with the aut aut of a disjunctive major, and with the determination of the object through one of the members of that division in the minor. Thus the procedure of reason by which the transcendental ideal becomes the basis of the determination of all possible things, is analogous to that which reason follows in disjunctive syllogisms, a proposition on which I tried before

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to base the systematical division of all transcendental ideas, and according to which they are produced, as corresponding to the three kinds of the syllogisms of reason.

It is self-evident that for that purpose, namely, in order simply to represent the necessary and complete determination of things, reason does not presuppose [p. 578] the existence of a^being that should correspond to the ideal, but its idea only, in order to derive from an unconditioned totality of complete determination the condi-^ tioned one, that_js__th£_totality of something limited. Reason therefore sees in the ideal the prototypon of all things which, as imperfect copies (ectypa), derive the material of their possibility from it, approaching more or less nearly to it, yet remaining always far from reaching it.

Thus all the possibility of things (or of the synthesis of the manifold according to their content) is considered as derivative, and the possibility of that only which includes in itself all reality as original. For all negations (which really are the only predicates by which everything else is distinguished from the truly real being) are limitations only of a greater and, in the last instance, of the highest reality, presupposing it, and, according to their content, derived from it. All the manifoldness of things consist only of so many modes of limiting the concept of the highest reality that forms their common substratum, in the same way as all figures are only different modes of limiting endless space. Hence the object of its ideal which exists in reason only is called the original Bein^ {ens originarium) , and so far as it hasjiothing aboye_jtjthe highest Being {ens summuin), and so far

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