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

If therefore we admit such ideal beings, we do not really

542 Transcendental Dialectic enlarge our knowledge beyond the objects of possible experience, but only the empirical unity of those objects, by means of that systematical unity of which the idea furnishes us the schema, and which therefore cannot claim to be a constitutive, but only a regulative principle. * For if we admit a something, or a real being, corresponding to the idea, we do not intend thereby to enlarge our knowledge of things by means of transcendentaP concepts; for such a being is admitted in the idea only, and not by itself, and only in order to express that systematical unity which is to guide the empirical use of our reason, [p. 675] without stating anything as to what is the ground of that unity or the internal nature of such a being on which, as its cause, that unity depends.

Thus the transcendental and the only definite concept which purely speculative reason gives us of God is in the strictest sense deistic ; that is, reason does not even supply us with the objective validity of such a concept, but only with the idea of something on which the highest and necessary unity of all empirical reality is founded, and which we cannot represent to ourselves except in analogy with a real substance, being, according to the laws of nature, the cause of all things ; always supposing that we undertake to think it at all as a particular object, and, satisfied with the mere idea of the regulative principle of reason, do not rather put aside the completion of all the conditions of our thought, as too much for the human understanding, which, however, is hardly compatible with that perfect systemati1 The early editions read transcendenten^ instead of transcendentalen, which is given in the corrigenda of the Fifth Edition ; it is not impossible, however, that Kant may have meant to write transcendeiiten^ in order to indicate the illegitimate use of these concepts.

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cal unity of our knowledge to which reason at least imposes no limits.

Thus it happens that, if we admit a Divine Being, we have not the slightest conception either of the internal possibility of its supreme perfection, nor of the [p. 6']6'\ necessity of its existence, but are able at least thus to satisfy all other questions relating to contingent things, and give the most perfect satisfaction to reason with reference to that highest unity in its empirical application that has to be investigated, but not in reference to that hypothesis itself. This proves that it is the speculative interest of reason, and not its real insight, which justifies it in starting from a point so far above its proper sphere, in order to survey from thence its objects, as belonging to a complete whole.

Here we meet with a distinction in our mode of thought, the premisses remaining the same, a distinction which is somewhat subtle, but of great importance in transcendental philosophy. I may have sufficient ground for admitting something relatively {siippositio relativa)^ without having a right to admit it absolutely {siippositio absoluta). This distinction comes in when we have to deal with a regulative principle, of which we know the necessity by itself, but not the source of this necessity, and where we admit a supreme cause, only in order to think the universality of the principle with greater definiteness. Thus, if I think of a being as existing which corresponds to a mere idea, and to a transcendental one, I ought not to admit the existence of such a being by itself, because no concepts through which I can conceive any [p. 6^^^ object definitely, can reach it, and the conditions of the objective validity of my concepts are excluded by the idea

544 Transcendental Dialectic