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.
Discipline of Pure Reason 6 1 3 and no mere censnra can put an end to the disputes regarding the rights of human reason.
Hume is, perhaps, the most ingenious of all sceptics, and without doubt the most important with regard to the influence which the sceptical method may exercise' in awakening reason to a thorough examination of its rights. It will therefore be worth our while to make clear to ourselves the course of his reasoning and the errors of an intelligent and estimable man, who at the outset of his enquiries was certainly on the right track of truth.
Hume was probably aware, though he never made it quite clear to himself, that in judgments of a certain kind we pass beyond our concept of the object. I have called this class of judgments synthetical. There is no difficulty as to how I may, by means of experience, pass beyond the concept which I have hitherto had. Experience is itself such a synthesis of perceptions through which a concept, which I have by means of one perception, is increased by means of other perceptions. But we imagine that we are able also a priori to pass beyond our concept [p. 765] and thus to enlarge our knowledge. This we attempt to do either by the pure understanding, in relation to that which can at least be an object of experience^ or even by means of pure reason, in relation to such qualities of things, or even the existence of such things, as can never occur in experience. Hume in his scepticism did not distinguish between these two kinds of judgments as he ought to have done, but regarded this augmentation of concepts by themselves, and, so to say, the spontaneous generation of our understanding (and of our reason), without being impregnated by experience, as perfectly impossible. Con6i4 Discipline of Pure Reason sidering all principles a priori as imaginary, he arrived at the conclusion that they were nothing but a habit arising from experience and its laws ; that they were therefore merely empirical, that is, in themselves, contingent rules to which we wrongly ascribe necessity and universality. In order to establish this strange proposition, he appealed to the generally admitted principle of the relation between cause and effect.
For as no faculty of the understanding could lead us from the concept of a thing to the existence of something else that should follow from it universally and necessarily, he thought himself justified in concluding that, without experience, we have nothing that could augment our concept and give us a right to form a judgment that extends itself a priori.
That the light of the sun which shines on the wax should melt the wax and at the same time harden the clay, no understand- [p. 'j66'\ ing, he maintained, could guess from the concepts which we had before of these things, much less infer, according to a law, experience only being able to teach us such a law.
We have seen, on the contrary, in the transcendental logic that, though we can never pass immediately beyond the content of a concept that is given us, we are nevertheless able, entirely a priori, but yet in reference to something else, namely, possible experience, to know the law of its connection with other things.
If, therefore, wax, which was formerly hard, melts, I can know a priori that sot7tething else must have preceded (for instance the heat of the sun) upon which this melting has followed according to a permanent law, although without experience I could never know a priori definitely either from the effect the cause, or from the cause the effect. Hume was therefore wrong in inferring from the mere contingency of our
Discipline of Pure Reason 615
being determined according to the law of causality, the contingency of that law itself, and he mistook our passing beyond the concept of a thing to some possible experience (which is entirely a priori and constitutes the objective reality of it) for the synthesis of the objects of real experience which, no doubt, is always empirical. He thus changed a principle of affinity which resides in the understanding and predicates necessary connection, into a rule of association residing in the imitative faculty of imagination, which can only represent contingent, but [p. 'J^'J^ never objective connections.
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