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

bondage of the senses ; nor should I even, without considering myself a very formidable antagonist, decline the challenge to detect the fallacy in every one of their attempts, and thus to dispose of their pretensions. But I know too well that the hope of better success [p. 639] will never be surrendered by those who have once accustomed themselves to dogmatical persuasion, and I therefore restrict myself to the one just demand, that my opponents should explain in general, from the nature of the human understanding, or from any other sources of knowledge, what we are to do in order to extend our knowledge entirely a priori y and to carry it to a point where no possible experience, and therefore no means whatever, is able to secure to a concept invented by ourselves its objective reality. In whatever way the understanding may have reached that concept, it is clearly impossible that the . existence of its object could be found in it through analysis, because the very knowledge of the existence of the object implies that it exists outside onr thoughts. We cannot in fact go beyond concepts, nor, unless we follow the empirical connection by which nothing but phenomena can be given, hope to discover new objects and imaginary beings.

Although then reason, in its purely speculative application, is utterly insufficient for this great undertaking, namely, to prove the existence of a Supreme Being, it has nevertheless this great advantage of being able to correct our knowledge of it, if it can be acquired from [p. 640] elsewhere, to make it consistent with itself and every intelligible view, and to purify it from everything incompatible with the concept of an original Being, and from all admixture of empirical limitations.

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In spite of its insufficiency, therefore, transcendental theology has a very important negative use, as a constant test of our reason, when occupied with pure ideas only, which, as such, admit of a transcendental standard only. For suppose that on practical grounds the admission of a highest and all-sufficient Being, as the highest intelligence, were to maintain its validity without contradiction, it would be of the greatest importance that we should be able to determine that concept accurately on its transcendental side, as the concept of a necessary and most real Being, to remove from it what is contradictory to that highest reality and purely phenomenal (anthropomorphic in the widest sense), and at the same time to put an end to all opposite assertions, whether atheistic , deistic^ or anthroponiorphistic. Such a critical treatment would not be difficult, because the same arguments by which the insufficiency of human reason in asserting the existence of such a Being has been proved, must be sufficient also to prove the invalidity of opposite assertions, [p. 641] For whence can anybody, through pure speculation of reason, derive his knowledge that there is no Supreme Being, as the cause of all that exists, or that it can claim none of those qualities which we, to judge from their effects, represent to ourselves as compatible with the dynamical realities of a thinking Being, or that, in the latter case, they would be subject to all those limitations which sensibility imposes inevitably on all the intelligences known to us by experience }

For the purely speculative use of reason, therefore, the Supreme Being remains, no doubt, an ideal only, but an ideal without a flaw, a concept which finishes and crowns the whole of human knowledge, and the objective reality

5 1 6 Transcendental Dialectic of which, though it cannot be proved, can neither be disproved in that way. If then there should be an Ethico-theology to supply that deficiency, transcendental theology, which before was problematical only, would prove itself indispensable in determining its concept, and in constantly testing reason, which is so often deceived by sensibility, and not even always in harmony with its own ideas. Necessity, infinity, unity, extra-mundane existence (not as a worldsoul), eternity, free from conditions of time, omnipresence, free from conditions of space, omnipotence, etc., all these are transcendental predicates, and their purified [p. 642] concepts, which are so much required for every theology, can therefore be derived from transcendental theology only.

APPENDIX

TO THE Transcendental Dialectic

Of the Regulative Use of the Ideas of Pure Reason

The result of all the dialectical attempts of pure reason does not only confirm what we proved in the transcendental Analytic, namely, that all our conclusions, which are to lead us beyond the field of possible experience, are fallacious and groundless, but teaches us also this in particular, that human reason has a natural inclination to overstep these limits, and that transcendental ideas are as natural to it as categories to the understanding, with this distinction, however, that while the latter convey truth, that is, agreement of our concepts with their objects, the former produce merely an irresistible illusion, against which we can defend ourselves by the severest criticism only.

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