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.
The first rule, therefore, is to attempt no transcendental] proofs before having first considered from whence wej should take the principles on which such proofs are to be based, and by what right we may expect our conclusions!
Discipline of Pure Reason 631
to be successful. If they are principles of the understanding (for instance of causality), it is useless to attempt to arrive, by means of them, at ideas of pure reason ; because they are valid only with regard to objects of experience. If they are principles of pure reason, it is again labour lost, because, though reason possesses such principles, they are all, as objective principles, dialectical and cannot be valid, except perhaps as regulative principles, for the empirical use of reason, in order to make it systematically coherent. If such so-called proofs exist already, we ought to meet their deceptive pleadings with the non liquet of a mature judgment ; and although we may be unable to expose their sophisms, we hav^ a perfect right [p. yZj^ to demand a deduction of the principles employed, which, if these principles are to have their origin in reason alone, will never be forthcoming. You may thus dispense with the analysis and refutation of every one of these sophisms, and dispose in a lump of the endless fallacies of Dialectic, by appealing to the tribunal of critical reason, which insists on laws.
The second peculiarity of transcendental proofs is this, that for every transcendental proposition one proof only can be found. If I have to draw conclusions, not from concepts, but from the intuition which corresponds to a concept, whether it be pure intuition, as in mathematics, or empirical, as in physical science, the intuition on which my conclusions are to rest supplies me with manifold material for synthetical propositions, which I may connect in more than one way, so that, by starting from different points, I can arrive at the same conclusion by different paths.
Every transcendental proposition, on the contrary, starts
632 Discipline of Pure Reason from 07ie concept only, and predicates the synthetical condition of the possibility of the object, according to that concept. There can therefore be but one proof, because beside that concept there is nothing else whereby that object could be determined. The proof therefore [p. y'^%'\ can contain nothing more but the determination of an object in general according to that concept, which is itself one only.
In the transcendental Analytic, for instance, we had deduced the principle, that everything which happens has a cause, from the single condition of the objective possibility of the concept of an event in general, namely, that the determination of any event in time, and therefore the event itself also, as belonging to experience, would be impossible, unless it were subject to such a dynamical rule.
This is therefore the only possible proof ; for the event which we represent to ourselves has objective validity, that is, truth, on this condition only, that an object is determined as belonging to that concept by means of the law of causality.
It is true that other arguments in support of this proposition have been attempted, for instance, one derived from contingency ; but if that argument is examined more carefully, we can discover no characteristic sign of contingency, except the happenings that is, existence preceded by the non-existence of the object, which leads us back to the same argument as before.
If the proposition has to be proved that everything which thinks is simple, no attention is paid to what is manifold in thought, and the concept of the ego only is kept in view, which is simple, and to which all thinking is referred. The same applies to the transcendental proof of the existence of God, which rests entirely on the reciprocability of the two concepts of a most real [p. 789]
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