Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason — trans. F. Max Müller
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The translator’s English as printed (F. Max Müller). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.
as everything as conditioned is_subjectjto_it, the Being; of all beings {ens entium). AH this hawevei^-does- not mean the objective relation of any real thing to other [p. 579] things, but of X}i\^J_deji to cmceptSy and leaves us in perfect ignorance as to the_exi-Stence-Qf_a being of _such superlative excellence.
Again, as we cannot say that an original being consists of so many derivative beings, because these in reality presuppose the former, and cannot therefore constitute it, it follows that the ideal of the original being must be conceived as simple.
The derivation of all other possibility from that original being cannot therefore, if we speak accurately, be considered as a limitation of its highest reality, and, as it were, a division of it — for in that case the original being would become to us a mere aggregate of derivative beings, which, according to what we have just explained, is impossible, though we represented it so in our first rough sketch. On the contrary, the highest reality would form the basis of the possibility of all things as a cause, and not as a sum total. The manifoldness of things would not depend on the lirnitation of the originalbemg,-^but onTts^omplete effect, and to this also would belong all oifT'sensibility, together with all reality in phenomenal appearance, which could not, as an ingredient, belong to the idea of a supreme being.
If we follow up this idea of ours and hypos- [p. 580] tasise it, we shall be able to determine the original being by means of the concept of the highest reality as one, simple, all sufhcient, eternal, etc., in one word, determine it in its unconditioned completeness through all predicaments. The concept of such_a being is Jhe_concept of
Transcendental Dialectic 469
God in its transcendental sense, and thus, as I indicated above, the ideal of pure reason is the object of a transcendental theology. '
' By such an employment of the transcendental idea, however, we should be overstepping the limits of its purpose and admissibility. Reason used it only, as being the concept of all reality, for a foundation of the complete determination of thingsjn general, without requiring that all this reality should be given objectively and constitute itself a thing. This is a mere fiction by which we comprehend and realise the manifold of our idea in one ideal, as a particular being. We have no right to do this, not even to assume the possibility of such an hypothesis ; nor do all the consequences which flow from such an ideal concern the complete determination of things in general, for the sake of which alone the idea was necessary, or influence it in the least.
It is not enough to describe the procedure [p. 581] of our reason and its dialectic, we must try also to discover its sources, in order to be able to explain that illusion itself as a phenomenon of the understanding. The ideal of which we are speaking is founded on a natural, not on a purely arbitrary idea. I ask, therefore, how does it happen that reason considers all the possibility of things as derived from one fundamental possibility, namely, that of the highest reality, and then presupposes it as contained in a particular original being }
The answer is easily found in the discussions of the transcendental Analytic. The possibility of the objects of our senses is their relation to our thought, by which something (namely, the empirical form) can be thought a priori^ while what constitutes the matter, the reality
470 Transcendental Dialectic in the phenomena (all that corresponds to sensation) must be given, because without it it could not even be thought, nor its possibility be represented. An object of the senses can be completely determined only when it is compared with all phenomenal predicates, and represented by them either affirmatively or negatively. As, however, that which constitutes the thing itself (as a phenomenon), namely, the real, must be given, and as without this the thing could not be conceived at all, and as that in which the real of all phenomena is given is what we [p. 582] call the one and all comprehending experience, it is necessary that the material for the possibility of all objects of our senses should be presupposed as given in one whole, on the limitation of which alone the possibility of all empirical objects, their difference from each other, and their complete determination can be founded. And since no other objects can be given us but those of the senses, and nowhere but in the context of a possible experience, nothing can be an object to us, if it does not presuppose that whole of all empirical reality, as the condition of its possibility. Owing to a natural illusion, we are led to consider a principle which applies only to the objects of onr senses, as a principle valid for all things, and thus to take the empirical principle of our concepts of the possibility of things as phenomena, by omitting this limitation, as a transcendental principle of the possibility of things in general.
If afterwards we hypostasise this idea of the whole of all reality, this is owing to our changing dialectically the distributive unity of the empirical use of our understanding into the collective unity of an empirical whole, and then represent to ourselves this whole of phenomena as
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