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

Transcende7ttal Dialectic 539

thing in general, serving only to obtain the greatest systematical unity in the empirical use of our reason, by helping us, as it were, to deduce the object of experience from the imagined object of that idea as its ground or cause. Thus we are led to say, for instance, that the [p. 671] things of the world must be considered as if they owed their existence to some supreme intelligence ; and the idea is thus a heuristic only, not an ostensive concept, showing us not how an object is really constituted, but how we, under the guidance of that concept, should look for the constitution and connection of the objects of experience in general. If, then, it can be shown that the three transcendental ideas (the psychological, cosfnologicaly and theological), although they cannot be used directly to detertnine any object corresponding to them, yet as rules ^ of the empirical use of reason will lead, under the presupposition of such an object in the idea, to a systematical unity, and to an extension of our empirical knowledge, without ever running counter to this knowledge, it becomes a necessary maxim of reason to act in accordance with such ideas. And this is really the transcendental deduction of all ideas of speculative reason, considered not as constitutive principles for extending our knowledge to more objects than can be given by experience, but as regulative principles for the systematical unity of the manifold of empirical knowledge in general, which knowledge, within its own limits, can thus be better arranged and improved than it would be possible without such ideas, and by the mere use of the principles of the understanding.

1 Instead of alle read ah.

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I shall try to make this clearer. Following [p. 672] these ideas as principles, we shall first (in psychology) connect all phenomena, all the activity and receptivity of our mind, according to our internal experience, as if our mind were a simple substance, existing permanently, and with personal identity (in this life at least), while its states, to which those of the body belong as external conditions, are changing continually.

Secondly (in cosmology), we are bound to follow up the conditions both of internal and external natural phenomena in an investigation that can never become complete, looking upon this investigation as infinite, and without any first or supreme member ; but we ought not therefore to deny the purely intelligible first grounds of these phenomena, as outside of them, though not allowed to bring them ever into connection with our explanations of nature, for the simple reason that we do not know them.

Thirdly, and lastly (in theology), we must consider everything that may belong to the whole of possible experience as if that experience formed one absolute but thoroughly dependent, and always, within the world of sense, conditioned unity ; but, at the same time, as if it, the whole of phenomena (the world of sense itself), had one supreme and all-sufficient ground, outside its sphere, namely, an independent, original, creative reason, in reference to which we direct all empirical use of otir [p. 673] reason in its widest extension in such a way as if the objects themselves had sprung from that archetype of all reason.

In other words, we ought not to derive the internal phenomena of the soul as if from a simple thinking substance, but derive them from each other, according to the idea of a simple being ; we ought not to derive the order and systematical unity of the world from a supreme

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intelligence, but borrow from the idea of a supremely wise cause the rule according to which reason may best be used for her own satisfaction in the connection of causes and effects in this world.

Now there is nothing that could in the least prevent us from admitting these ideas as objective and hypostatical also, except in the case of the cosmological idea, whefe reason, when trying to carry it out objectively, is met by an antinomy. There is no such antinomy in the psychological and theological ideas, and how could anybody contest their objective reality, as he knows as little how to deny, as we how to assert, their possibility }

It is true nevertheless that, in order to admit anything, it is not enough that there should be no positive impediment to it, nor are we allowed to introduce fictions of our thoughts, transcending all our concepts, though contradicting none, as real and definite objects, on the mere credit of our somewhat perfunctory speculative reason, [p. 674] They should not therefore be admitted as real in themselves, but their reality should only be considered as the reality of a schema of a regulative principle for the systematical unity of all natural knowledge. Hence they are to be admitted as analoga only of real things, and not as real things in themselves. We remove from the object of an idea the conditions which limit the concepts of our understanding, and which alone enable us to have a definite concept of anything ; and then we represent to ourselves a something of which we know not in the least what it is by itself, but which, nevertheless, we represent to ourselves in a relation to the whole of phenomena, analogous to that relation which phenomena have among themselves.