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.
it can do is to rouse reason from her sweet dogmatical dreams, and to induce her to examine more carefully her own position. As, however, the sceptical manner of avoiding a troublesome business seems to be the shortest way out of all difficulties, and promises to lead to a permanent peace in philosophy, or is chosen at least as the highroad by all who, under the pretence of a scornful dislike of all investigations of this kind, try to give themselves the air of philosophers, it seems necessary to exhibit this mode of thought in its true light.
The hnpossibility of a Sceptical Satisfaction of [p. 758] Pure Reason in Conflict zvith itself
The consciousness of my ignorance (unless we recognise at the same time its necessity) ought, instead of forming the end of my investigations, to serve, on the contrary, as their strongest impulse. All ignorance is either an ignorance of things, or an ignorance of the limits of our cognition. If ignorance is accidental, it should incite us, in the former case, to investigate things dogmatically, in the latter to investigate the limits of possible knowledge critically. That my ignorance is absolutely necessary and that I am absolved from the duty. of all further investigation, can never be established empirically by mere observation, but critically only, by a thorough examination of the first sources of our knowledge. The determination of the true limits of our reason, therefore, can be made on ^/r/^r/ grounds only, while its limitation, which consists in a general recognition of our never entirely removable ignorance, may be realised a posteriori also, by seeing how much remams to be known in spite of
Discipline of Piwe Reason 609
ail that can be known. The former knowledge of our ignorance, possible only by criticism of reason, is truly scientific, the latter is merely matter of experience, [p. 759] where it is never possible to say how far the inferences drawn from it may reach. If I regard the earth, according to the evidence of my senses, as a flat surface, I cannot tell how far it may extend. But what experience teaches me is, that wheresoever I go, I always see before me a space in which I can proceed further. Thus I am conscious of the limits of my actual knowledge of the earth at any given moment, but not of the limits of all possible geography. But if I have got so far as to know that the earth is a sphere and its surface spherical, I am able from any small portion of it, for instance, from a degree, to know definitely and according to principles a priori, the diameter, and through it, the complete periphery of the earth ; and, though I am ignorant with regard to the objects which are contained in that surface, I am not so with regard to its extent, its magnitude, and its limits.
In a similar manner the whole of the objects of our knowledge appears to us like a level surface, with its apparent horizon which encircles its whole extent, and was called by us the idea of unconditioned totality. To reach this limit empirically is impossible, and all attempts have proved vain to determine \t a priori according to a certain principle. Nevertheless, all questions of pure reason refer to what lies outside of that horizon, or, it may be, on its boundary line. [p. 760]
The celebrated David Hume was one of those geographers of human reason who supposed that all those questions were sufficiently disposed of by being relegated
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6io Discipline of Pure Reason outside that horizon, which, however, he was not able to determine.
He was chiefly occupied with the principle of causality, and remarked quite rightly, that the truth of this principle (and even the objective validity of the concept of an efficient cause in general) was based on no knowledge, i.e. on no cognition a priori, and that its authority rested by no means on the necessity of such a law, but merely on its general usefulness in experience, and on a kind of subjective necessity arising from thence, which he called habit.
From the inability of reason to employ this principle beyond the limits of experience he inferred the nullity of all the pretensions of reason in her attempts to pass beyond what is empirical.
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