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.
we take our stand and extend our conquests, trying to explain all varieties and seeming deviations from those rules from the same principle, nay, adding more than experience can ever affirm, namely, imaginary hyperbolic courses of comets constructed according to the rules of affinity, in which courses these heavenly bodies may entirely leave our solar system, and, moving from sun to sun, unite in their course the most distant parts of a universe unlimited to our minds, but yet held together by one and the same moving power.
What is most remarkable in these principles, and is, in fact, their chief interest for us is, that they seem to be transcendental, and, although containing mere ideas for the guidance of the empirical use of reason, ideas which our reason can only follow as it were asymptotically, that is, approximately and without our reaching them, they nevertheless possess, as synthetical propositions a priori^ an objective, though an undefined validity, serving as a rule for possible experience, nay, as heuristic principles in the elaboration of experience. With all this a transcendental deduction of them cannot be produced, [p. 664] and is, in fact, as we have proved before, always impossible with regard to ideas.
In the transcendental Analytic we distinguished the dynamical principles of the understanding, as purely regulative principles of the intuition, from the mathematical, which, in regard to intuition, are constitutive. In spite of this, these dynamical laws are constitutive with regard to experience, because they render the concepts, without which there can be no experience, a priori possible. The principles of pure reason, however, cannot be constitutive, even with reference to empirical concepts, because we cannot
534 Transcendental Dialectic assign to them any corresponding schema of sensibility ; they cannot, consequently, have any object in concreto. If, then, I give up an empirical use of them as constitutive principles, how can I yet secure to them a regulative employment, and with it some objective validity, and what can be the meaning of it ?
The understanding forms an object for reason in the same manner as sensibility for the understanding. It is the proper business of reason to render the unity of all possible empirical acts of the understanding systematical, in the same manner as the understanding connects the manifold of phenomena by concepts, and brings it under empirical laws. The acts of the understanding, however, without the schemata of sensibility, are nndefinedy and in the same manner the unity of reason is in itself [p. 665] undefined with reference to the conditions under which, and the extent to which, the understanding may connect its concepts systematically. But although no schema of intuition can be discovered for the perfect systematical unity of all the concepts of the understanding, it is possible and necessary that there should be an analogon of such a schema, and this is the idea of the maximum^ both of the division and of the combination of the knowledge of the understanding under one single principle. It is quite possible to form a definite thought of what is greatest and absolutely complete, when all restrictive conditions that lead to an undefined manifoldness have been omitted. In this sense the idea of reason forms an analogon of the schema of sensibility, but with this difference, that the application of the concepts of the understanding to the schema of reason is not a knowledge of the object itself, as in the case of the application of the categories
Transcendental Dialectic 535
to sensuous schemata, but only a rule or principle for the systematical unity in the whole use of the understanding. Now, as every principle which fixes a priori a perfect unity of its use for the understanding is valid, though indirectly only, for the object of experience also, it follows that the principles of pure reason have objective reality with reference to that object also, not, however, in order to determi^ie anything therein, but only in order to indicate the procedure by which the empirical and definite use of the understanding may throughout re- [p. 666'\ main in complete harmony with itself, by being brought into connection, as mitch as possible, with the principle of systematical unity, and being deduced from it.
I call all subjective principles which are derived, not from the quality of an object, but from the interest which reason takes in a certain possible perfection of our knowledge of an object, maxims of reason. Thus there are maxims of speculative reason, which rest entirely on its speculative interest, though they may seem to be objective principles.
When purely regulative principles are taken for constitutive, they may become contradictory, as objective principles. If, however, they are taken for maxims only, there is no real contradiction, but it is only the different interest of reason which causes different modes of thought. In reality, reason has one interest only, and the conflict of its maxims arises only from a difference and a mutual limitation of the methods in which that interest is to be satisfied.
In this manner one philosopher is influenced more by the interest of diversity (according to the principle of specification), another by the interests of tuiity (according
53^ Transcendejital Dialectic
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