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

Everything that is founded in the nature of our faculties must have some purpose, and be in harmony with the right use of them, if only we can guard against a certain misunderstanding and discover their [p. 643] proper direction. The transcendental ideas, therefore, will probably possess their own proper and, therefore, i^nmanent use, although, if their object is misunderstood, and they are mistaken for the concepts of real things, they may become transcendent in their application, and hence deceptive. For not the idea in itself, but its use only can, in regard to the whole of possible experience, be either transcendent or iinmanerit, according as we direct them either immediately to objects wrongly supposed to correspond to them, or only to the use of the understanding in general with reference to objects with which it has a right to deal. All the faults of snbreptio are to be attributed to a want of judgment, never to the understanding or to reason themselves.

Reason never refers immediately to an object, but to the understanding only, and through it to its own empirical use. It does wot form, therefore, concepts of objects, but arranges them only, and imparts to them that unity which they can have in their greatest possible extension, that is, with reference to the totality of different series ; while the understanding does not concern itself with this totality, but only with that connection through which such series of conditions become possible according to concepts. Reason has therefore for its object [p. 644] the understanding only and its fittest employment ; and, as the understanding brings unity into the manifold of the objects by means of concepts, reason brings unity into the manifold of concepts by means of ideas, making a

5 1 8 Transcendental Dialectic 2certain collective unity the aim of the operations of the understanding, which otherwise is occupied with distributive unity only

I maintain, accordingly, that transcendental ideas ought never to be employed as constitutive, so that by them concepts of certain objects should be given, and that, if they are so employed, they are merely sophistical (dialectic concepts). They have, however, a most admirable and indispensably necessary regulative use, in directing the understanding to a certain aim, towards which all the lines of its rules converge and which, though it is an idea only {focus imaginaritis)^ that is, a point from which, as lying completely outside the limits of possible experience, the concepts of the understanding do not in reality proceed, serves nevertheless to impart to them the greatest unity and the greatest extension. Hence there arises, no doubt, the illusion, as if those lines sprang ^ from an object itself, outside the field of empirically possible experience (as objects are seen behind the surface of a mirror) ; but this illusion (by which we need not allow ourselves to be deceived) is nevertheless indispensably necessary, if, besides the objects which lie before our eyes, [p. 645] we want to see those also which lie far away at our back, that is to say, if, as in our case, we wdsh to direct the understanding beyond every given experience (as a part of the whole of possible experience), and thus to its greatest possible, or extremest extension.

If we review the entire extent of our knowledge supplied to us by the understanding, we shall find that it is the systeniatising of that knowledge, that is, its cohe-

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