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

this pure knowledge has for its condition that objects are given in intuition, to which it can be appHed, for without intuition all our knowledge would be without objects, and it would therefore remain entirely empty.

That part of transcendental logic therefore which teaches the elements of the pure knowledge of the understanding, and the principles without which no object can be thought, is transcendental Analytic, and at the same time a logic of truth. No knowledge can contradict it without losing at the same time all contents, that is, all relation to any [p. 63] object, and therefore all truth.

But as it is very tempting to use this pure knowledge of the understanding and its principles by themselves, and even beyond the limits of all experience, which alone can supply the material or the objects to which those pure concepts of the understanding can be applied, the understanding runs the risk of making, through mere sophisms, a material use of the purely formal principles of the pure understanding, and thus of judging indiscriminately of objects which are not given to us, nay, perhaps can never be given.

As it is properly meant to be a mere canon for criticising the empirical use of the understanding, it is a real abuse if it is allowed as an organum of its general and unlimited application, by our venturing, with the pure understanding alone, to judge synthetically of objects in general, or to affirm and decide anything about them. In this case the employment of the pure understanding would become dialectical.

The second part of transcendental logic must therefore form a critique of that dialectical semblance, and is called transcendental Dialectic, not as an art of producing dogmatically such semblance (an art but too popular with many metaphysical jugglers), but as a critique of the

Transcendental Logic 5 1

r. understanding and reason with regard to their hyperIphysical employment, in order thus to lay bare the false semblance of its groundless pretensions, and to [p. 64] reduce its claims to discovery and expansion, which was to be achieved by means of transcendental principles only, to a mere critique, serving as a protection of the pure understanding against all sophistical illusions.

52 Transcendental Logic

TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC

First Division Transcendental Analytic

Transcendental Analytic consists in the dissection of all our knowledge a priori into the elements which constitute the knowledge of the pure understanding. Four points are here essential : first, that the concepts should be pure and not empirical ; secondly, that they should not belong to intuition and sensibility, but to thought and understanding ; thirdly, that the concepts should be elementary and carefully distinguished from derivative or composite concepts ; fourthly, that our tables should be complete and that they should cover the whole field of the pure understanding.

This completeness of a science cannot be confidently accepted on the strength of a mere estimate, or by means of repeated experiments only ; what is required for it is an idea of the totality of the a priori knowledge of the understanding, and a classification of the concepts based [p. 65] upon it; in fact, a systematic treatment. Pure understanding must be distinguished, not merely from all that is empirical, but even from all sensibility. It constitutes therefore a unity independent in itself, self-sufficient, and not to be increased by any additions from without. The sum of its knowledge must constitute a system, compreTranscendental Logic 53 hended and determined by one idea, and its completeness and articulation must form the test of the correctness and genuineness of its component parts.

This part of transcendental logic consists of two books, the one containing the concepts, the other the principles of pure understanding.

TRANSCENDENTAL ANALYTIC

BOOK I

ANALYTIC OF CONCEPTS