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

In the field of pure reason, therefore, hypotheses are admitted as weapons of defence only, not in order to establish a right, but simply in order to defend it ; and it

624 Discipline cf Pure Reason is our duty at all times to look for a real opponent within ourselves. Speculative reason in its transcendental employment is by its very nature dialectical. The objections which we have to fear lie in ourselves. We must look for them as we look for old, but never superannuated claims, if we wish to destroy them, and thus to establish a permanent peace. External tranquillity is a mere illusion. It is necessary to root up the very germ of these objections which lies in the nature of human reason ; and how can we root it up, unless we allow it freedom, nay, [p. J']'^'\ offer it nourishment, so that it may send out shoots, and thus discover itself to our eyes, so that we may afterwards destroy it with its very root } Try yourselves therefore to discover objections of which no opponent has ever thought ; nay, lend him your weapons, and grant him the most favourable position which he could wish for. You have nothing to fear in all this, but much to hope for, namely, that you may gain a possession which no one will ever again venture to contest.

In order to be completely equipped you require the hypotheses of pure reason also, which, although but leaden weapons (because not steeled by any law of experience), are yet quite as strong as those which any opponent is likely to use against you. If, therefore (for any not speculative reason), you have admitted the immaterial nature of the soul, which is not subject to any corporeal changes, and you are met by the difficulty that nevertheless experience seems to prove both the elevation and the decay of our mental faculties as different modifications of our organs, you can weaken the force of this objection by saying that you look upon the body as a fundamental phenomenon only, which, in our present state (in this life), forms the

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condition of all the faculties of our sensibility, and hence of our thought. In that case the separation from the body would be the end of the sensuous employment and the beginning of the intelligible employment of our faculty of knowledge. The body would thus have to be [p. 779] considered, not as the cause of our thinking, but only as a restrictive condition of it, and, therefore, if on one side as a support of our sensuous and animal life, on the other, all the more, as an impediment of our pure and spiritual life, so that the dependence of the animal life on the constitution of the body would in no wise prove the dependence of our whole life on the state of our organs. You may go even further and discover new doubts which have either not been raised at all before, or at all events have not been carried far enough.

Generation in the human race, as well as among irrational creatures, depends on so many accidents, on occasion, on sufficient sustenance, on the views and whims of government, nay, even on vice, that it is difficult to believe in the eternal existence of a being whose life has first begun under circumstances so trivial, and so entirely dependent on our own choice. As regards the continuance (here on earth) of the whole race, there is less difficulty, because the accidents in individual cases are subject nevertheless to a rule with regard to the whole. With regard to each individual, however, to expect so important an effect from such insignificant causes seems very strange. But even against this you may adduce the following transcendental hypothesis, namely, that all life is really intelligible only, not subject to the changes of time, and neither [p. 780] beginning in birth, nor ending in death. You may say that this life is phenomenal only, that is, a sensuous repre2 s

626 Discipline of Pure Reason sentation of the pure spiritual life, and that the whole world of sense is but an image passing before our present mode of knowledge, but, like a dream, without any objective reality in itself ; nay, that if we could see ourselves and other objects also as they really are, we should see ourselves in a world of spiritual natures, our community with which did neither begin at our birth nor will end with the death of the body, both being purely phenomenal.