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

These relatively fundamental powers must again be compared with each other, in order, if possible, by discovering their harmony, to bring them nearer to one only radical, that is, absolute fundamental power. Such a unity, however, is only an hypothesis of reason. It is not maintained that such a unity must really exist, but only that we must look for it in the interest of reason, that is, for the establishment of certain principles for the various rules supplied to us by experience, and thus introduce, if it is possible, systematical unity into our know- [p. 650] ledge.

If, however, we watch the transcendental use of the understanding, we find that the idea of a fundamental power is not only meant as a problem, and for hypothetiTranscendental Dialectic 523 cal use, but claims for itself objective reality, postulating the systematical unity of the diverse pov^ers of a substance, and thus establishing an apodictic principle of reason. For without even having tested the harmony of those diverse pov^ers, nay, even if failing to discover it, after repeated experiments, we still suppose that such a unity exists, and this not only, as in our example, on account of the unity of the substance, but even in cases where very many, though to a certain degree homogeneous, powers are seen, as in matter in general. Here, too, reason presupposes a systematical unity of diverse powers, because particular laws of nature are subject to more general laws, and parsimony in principles is not only considered as an economical rule of reason, but as an essential law of nature.

And, indeed, it is difficult to understand how a logical principle by which reason demands the unity of rules can exist without a transcendental principle, by which such a systematical unity is admitted as inherent in the objects themselves, and as a priori necessary. For how could reason in its logical application presume to treat [p. 651] the diversity of powers which we see in nature as simply a disguised unity, and to deduce it, as far as possible, from some fundamental power, if it were open to reason to admit equally the diversity of all powers, and to look upon the systematical unity in their derivation as contrary to nature } In doing this reason would run counter to its own destination, and propose as its aim an idea contrary to the constitution of nature. Nor could we say that reason had previously, according to its principles, deduced that unity from the contingent character of nature, because this law of reason, compelling her to look for unity, is

524 Transcendental Dialectic necessary, and without it we should have no reason at all, and, in the absence of reason, no coherent use of the understanding, and, in the absence of that, no sufficient test of empirical truth ; — on which account we must admit the systematical unity of nature as objectively valid and necessary.

We find this transcendental presupposition concealed in the cleverest way in the principles of philosophers, though they are not aware of it, nor have confessed it to themselves. That all the diversities of particular things do not exclude identity of species, that the various species must be treated as different determinations (varieties) [p. 652] of a few genera, and these again of still higher genera ; that therefore we ought to look for a certain systematical unity of all possible empirical concepts, as derivable from higher and more general concepts, this is a rule of the schools or a logical principle without which no use of the understanding would be possible ; for we can only conclude the particular from the general, if the general qualities of things form the foundation on which the particular qualities rest.

That, however, there exists in nature such a unity, is only a supposition of the philosophers, embodied in their well-known scholastic rule, ^entia praeter necessitate^n non esse mtiltiplicanday 'beginnings or principles should not be multiplied beyond necessity.' It is implied in this, that the nature of things itself offers material for the postulated unity of reason, and that the apparent infinite variety ought not to prevent us from supposing behind it the existence of unity in fundamental properties, from which all diversity is derived by mere determination only. That unity, though it is an idea only, has been at all times so

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