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.
At this point we are able to place the results of the whole transcendental Dialectic clearly before our eyes, and to define accurately the final aim of the ideas [p. 680] of pure reason, which could become dialectical through misapprehension and carelessness only. Pure reason is, in fact, concerned with nothing but itself, nor can it have any other occupation, because what is given to it are not the objects intended for the unity of an empirical concept, but the knowledge supplied by the understanding for the unity of the concept of reason, that is, of its connection according to a principle. The unity of reason is the unity of a system, and that systematical unity does not serve objectively as a principle of reason to extend its sway over objects, but subjectively as a maxim to extend its sway over all possible empirical knowledge of objects. Nevertheless, the systematical connection which reason can impart to the understanding in its empirical use helps not only to extend that use, but confirms at the same time its correctness ; nay, the principle of such systematical unity is objective also, though in an indefinite manner {principitmi vagum)y not as a constitutive principle, determining something in its direct object, but only as a regulative principle and maxim, advancing and strengthening infinitely (indefinitely), the empirical use of reason by the opening of new paths unknown to the understanding.
Transcendental Dialectic 547
without ever running counter to the laws of its practical use.
Reason, however, cannot think this systemat- [p. 681] ical unity, without attributing to its idea an object, which, as experience has never given an example of complete systematical unity, can never be given in any experience. This Being, demanded by reason {ens rationis ratiocinatae), is no doubt a mere idea, and not therefore received as something absolutely real and real by itself. It is only admitted problematically (for we cannot reach it by any concepts of the understanding), in order to enable us to look upon the connection of things in the world of sense, as if they had their ground in that being, the real intention being to found upon it that systematical unity which is indispensable to reason, helpful in every way to the empirical knowledge of the understanding, and never a hindrance to it.
We misapprehend at once the true meaning of that idea, if we accept it as the assertion, or even as the hypothesis of a real thing to which the ground of the systematical construction of the world should be ascribed. What we ought to do is to leave it entirely uncertain, what that ground which escapes all our concepts may be by itself, and to use the idea only as a point of view from which alone we may expand that unity which is as essential to reason as beneficial to the understanding. In one word, that transcendental thing is only the schema of [p. 682] the regulative principle with which reason spreads systematical unity, as far as possible, over all experience.
The first object of such an idea is the ego, considered merely as a thinking nature (soul). Now if I want to know the qualities with which a thinking being exists in
54^ Transcendental Dialectic itself, I have to consult experience : but of all the categories, I cannot apply a single one to that object, unless its schema is given in sensuous intuition. Thus, however, I can never arrive at a systematical unity of all the phenomena of the internal sense.
Reason, therefore, instead of taking from experience the concept of that which the soul is in reality, which would not lead us very far, prefers the concept of the empirical unity of all thought, and by representing that unity as unconditioned and original, it changes it into a concept of reason, or an idea of a simple substance, a substance unchangeable in itself (personally identical), and in communication with other real things outside it ; in one word, into a simple self-subsistent intelligence.
In doing this, its object is merely to find principles of systematical unity for the explanation of the phenomena of the soul, so that all determinations may be received as existing in one subject, all powers, as much as possible, as derived from one fundamental power, and all changes as belonging to the states of one and the same permanent being, while all pJienomena in [p. 683] space are represented as totally different from the acts of thonght.
That simplicity of substance, etc., was only meant to be the schema of this regulative principle ; it is not assumed to be the real ground of all the properties of the soul.
These properties may rest on quite different grounds, of which we know nothing ; nor could we know the soul even by these assumed predicates by itself, even if we regarded them as absolutely valid with regard to it, for they really constitute a mere idea which cannot be represented i7i concreto.
Nothing but good can spring from such a psychological idea, if only we take care not to take it for more than an idea, that is, if we apply it only in reTrmiscendental Dialectic 549
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