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

refer to purely imaginary objects, which are supposed to be possible. They are purely problematical, in order to supply (as heuristic fictions) regulative principles for the systematical employment of the understanding in the sphere of experience. If they are not that, they would become mere fictions the possibility of which is quite indemonstrable, and which, therefore, can never be employed as hypotheses for the explanation of real phenomena. It is quite permissible to represent the soul to ourselves as simple, in order, according to this idea, to use the complete and necessary unity of all the faculties of the soul, although we cannot understand it in concreto, as the principle of all our enquiries into its internal phenomena. But to assume the soul as a simple substance (which is a transcendent concept) would be a proposition, not only indemonstrable (this is the case with several physical hypotheses), but purely [p. 'JJ2\ arbitrary and rash : because the simple can never occur in any experience, and if by substance we understand the permanent object of sensuous intuition, the very possibility of a simple phenomenon is perfectly inconceivable. Reason has no right whatever to assume, as an opinion, purely intelligible beings, or purely intelligible qualities of the objects of the senses ; although, on the other side, as we have no concepts whatever, either of their possibility or impossibility, we cannot claim any truer insight enabling us to deny dogmatically their possibility.

In order to explain given phenomena, no other things or reasons can be adduced but those which, according to the already known laws of phenomena, have been put in connection with them. A transcendental hypothesis, adduc620 Discipline of Pure Reason 3ing a mere idea of reason for the explanation of natural things, would therefore be no explanation at all, because it would really be an attempt at explaining what, according to known empirical principles, we do not understand sufficiently by something which we do not understand at all. Nor would the principle of such an hypothesis serve to help the understanding with regard to its objects, but only to satisfy our reason. Order and design in nature must themselves be explained on natural grounds and according to natural laws ; and for this [p. 773] purpose even the wildest hypotheses, if only they are physical, are more tolerable than a hyperphysical one, — that is, the appeal to the Divine Author, who is called in for that very purpose. This would be a principle of ratio ignava, to pass by all causes the objective reality of which, in their possibility at least, may be known by continued experience, in order to rest on a mere idea, which no doubt is very agreeable to our reason. With regard to the absolute totality of the ground of explanation in the series of causes, there can be no difficulty, considering that all mundane objects are nothing but phenomena, in which we can never hope to find absolute completeness in the synthesis of the series of conditions.

It is impossible to allow transcendental hypotheses in the speculative use of reason, or the use of hyperphysical instead of physical explanations ; partly, because reason is not in the least advanced in that way, but, on the contrary, cut off from its own proper employment, partly because such a licence would in the end deprive reason of all the fruits that spring from the cultivation of its own proper soil, namely, experience. It is true, no doubt, that