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.
lation to the systematical use of reason, with reference to the phenomena of our soul. For in that case no empirical laws of corporeal phenomena, which are of a totally different kind, are mixed up with the explanation of what belongs to the internal sense ; and no windy hypothesis of generation, extinction, and palingenesis of souls are admitted.
The consideration of this object of the internal sense remains pure and unmixed with heterogeneous matters, while reason in its investigations is directed towards tracing all the grounds of explanation, as far as possible, to one single principle ; and this can best be achieved, [p. 684] nay, cannot be achieved otherwise but by such a schema which attributes to the soul hypothetically the character of a real being.
The psychological idea cannot be anything but such a schema of a regulative concept.
The very question, for instance, whether the soul by itself be of a spiritual nature, would have no meaning, because, by such a concept, I should take away not only corporeal, but all nature, that is, all predicates of any possible experience, and therefore all the conditions under which the object of such a concept could be thought ; and, in that case, the concept would have no meaning at all.
The second regulative idea of speculative reason is the concept of the universe. For nature is really the only object given to us in regard to which reason requires regulative principles. Nature, however, is twofold, either thinking or corporeal. In order to think the internal possibility of the latter, that is, in order to determine the application of the categories to it, we require no idea, that is, no representation which transcends experience. Nor is such an idea possible in regard to it, because we are here guided by sensuous intuition only, different from
550 Ti'anscendental Dialectic what it was in the case of the psychological fundamental concept of the I, which contains a priori 2, certain form of thought, namely, the unity of the I. There remains therefore for pure reason nothing to deal with but [p. 685] nature in general, and the completeness of its conditions according to some principle.
The absolute totality of the series of these conditions determining the derivation of all their members, is an idea which, though never brought to perfection in the empirical use of reason, may yet become a rule, telling us how to proceed in the explanation of given phenomena (whether in an ascending or descending line), namely, as if the series were in themselves infinite, that is, in indefifiittim ; while, when reason itself is considered as the determining cause (in freedom), in the case of practical principles therefore, we must proceed as if we had to deal, not with an object of the senses, but with one of the pure understanding.
Here the conditions are no longer placed within the series of phenomena, but outside it, and the series of states considered, as if it had an absolute beginning through an intelligible cause. All this proves that cosmological ideas are nothing but regulative principles, and by no means constitutive, as establishing a real totality of such series. The remainder of this argument may be seen in its place, namely, in the chapter on the Antinomy of Pure Reason.
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