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

to the principle of aggregation). Each believes [p. 66j'\ that he has derived his judgment from his insight into the object, and yet founds it entirely on the greater or smaller attachment to one of the two principles, neither^ of which rests on objective grounds, but only on an interest of reason, and should therefore be called maxims rather than principles. I often see even intelligent men quarrelling with each other about the characteristic distinctions of men, animals, or plants, nay, even of minerals, the one admitting the existence of certain tribal characteristics, founded on descent, or decided and inherited differences of families, races, etc., while others insist that nature has made the same provision for all, and that all differences are due to accidental environment. But they need only consider the nature of the object, in order to understand that it is far too deeply hidden for both of them to enable them to speak from a real insight into the nature of the object. It is nothing but the twofold interest of reason, one party cherishing the one, another party the other, or pretending to do so. But this difference of the two maxims of manifoldness or unity in nature may easily be adjusted, though as long as they are taken for objective knowledge they cause not only disputes, but actually create impediments which hinder the progress of truth, until a means is found of reconciling [p. 66%'\ the contradictory interests, and thus giving satisfaction to reason.

The same applies to the assertion or denial of the famous law of the continuous scale of created beings, first advanced by Leibniz, and so cleverly trimmed up by

1 Read keiner instead of keine.

Transcendental Dialectic 537

Bonnet. It is nothing but a carrying out of the principle of affinity, resting on the interest of reason ; for neither observation nor insight into the constitution of nature could ever have supplied it as an objective assertion. The steps of such a ladder, as far as they can be supplied by experience, are too far apart from each other, and the so-called small differences are often in nature itself such wide gaps that no value can be attached to such observations as revealing the intentions of nature, particularly as it must always be easy to discover in the great variety of things certain similarities and approximations. The method, on the contrary, of looking for order in nature, according to such a principle, and the maxim of admitting such order (though it may be uncertain where and how far) as existing in nature in general, form certainly a legitimate and excellent regulative principle of reason, only that, as such, it goes far beyond where experience or observation could follow it It only indicates the way which leads to systematical unity, but does not determine anything beyond.

Of the Ultitnate Aim of the Natural Dialectic of

Htiman Reason [p. 669]

The ideas of pure reason can never be dialectical in themselves, but it must be due to their misemployment, if a deceptive illusion arise from them. They are given to us by the nature _of our reason, and this highest tribunal of all the rights and claims of speculation cannot possibly itself contain original fallacies and ^deceits. We must suppose, therefore, that they had a good and legitimate intention in the natural disposition of our reason.

53^ Transcendental Dialectic

The mob of sophists, however, cry out as usual about absurdities and contradictions, and blame the government the secret plans of which they cannot even understand, while it is to its beneficent influence that they owe their protection and that amount of intelligence which enables them to blame and condemn the government.

We cannot use a concept a priori with any safety, without having first established its transcendental deduction. It is true the ideas of pure reason do not allow of a deduction in the same manner as the categories ; but if they are to claim any, though only an undefined objective validity, and are not to represent mere fictions of thought only (entia rationis ratiocinantis), a [p. 670] deduction of them must be possible, even though it may differ from that, which we were able to give of the categories. This will form the completion of the critical task of pure reason, and it is this which we now mean to undertake.

It makes a great difference whether something is represented to our reason as an object absolutely, or merely as an object in the idea. In the former case my concepts are meant to determine the object, in the latter there is only a schema to which no object, not even a hypothetical one, corresponds directly, but which only serves to represent to ourselves indirectly other objects through their relation to that idea, and according to their systematical unity. Thus I say that the concept of a highest intelligence is a mere idea, that is, that its objective reality is not to consist in its referring directly to any object (for in that sense we should not be able to justify its objective validity) ; but that it is only a schema, arranged according to the conditions of the highest unity of reason, of the concept of a