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.
If I take no account of the contents of knowledge, objectively considered, all knowledge is, from a subjective point of view, either historical or rational. His- [p. 836] torical knowledge is cognitio ex datis, rational knowledge cognitio ex principiis. Whatever may be the first origin of some branch of knowledge, it is always historical, if he who possesses it knows only so much of it as has been given to him from outside, whether through immediate experience, or through narration, or by instruction also (in general knowledge). Hence a person who, in the usual sense, has learnt a system of philosophy, for instance the Wolfian, though he may carry in his head all the principles, definitions, and proofs, as well as the division of the whole system, and have it all at his fingers' ends, possesses yet none but a complete historical knowledge of the Wolfian philosophy. His knowledge and judgments .are no more than what has been given him. If you dispute any definition, he does not know whence to take another, because he formed his own on the reason of another. But the imitative is not the productive faculty, that is, knowledge in his case did not come from reason, and though objectively it is rational knowledge, subjectively it is historical only. He has taken and kept,
Architectonic of Pure Reason 671
that is, he has well learned and has become a plaster cast of a living man. Knowledge, which is rational objectively (that is, which can arise originally from a man's own reason only), can then only be so called subjectively also, when they have been drawn from the general resources of reason, that is, from principles from which [p. 837] also criticism, nay, even the rejection of what has been learnt, may arise.
All knowledge of reason is again either based on concepts or on the construction of concepts ; the former being called philosophical, the latter mathematical. Of their essential difference I have treated in the first chapter. Knowledge, as we saw, may be objectively philosophical, and yet subjectively historical, as is the case with most apprentices, and with all who never look beyond their school and remain in a state of pupilage all their life. But it is strange that mathematical knowledge, as soon as it has been acquired, may be considered, subjectively also, as knowledge of reason, there being no such distinction here as in the case of philosophical knowledge. The reason is that the sources from which alone the mathematical teacher can take his knowledge lie nowhere but in the essential and genuine principles of reason, and cannot be taken by the pupil from anywhere else, nor ever be disputed, for the simple ground that the employment of reason takes place here in concreto only, although a priori^ namely, in the pure and therefore faultless intuition, thus excluding all illusion and error. Of all the sciences of reason (a prioi^i), therefore, mathematics alone can be learnt, but philosophy (unless it be historically) never ; with regard to reason we can at most learn to philosophise.
The system of all philosophical knowledge [p. 838]
6/2 Architectonic of Pure Reason is called philosophy. It must be taken objectively, if we understand by it the type of criticising all philosophical attempts, which is to serve for the criticism of every subjective philosophy, however various and changeable the systems may be. In this manner philosophy is a mere idea of a possible science which exists nowhere in concretOy but which we may try to approach on different paths, until in the end the only true path, though overgrown and hidden by sensibility, has been discovered, and the image, which has so often proved a failure, has become as like the original type as human power can ever make it. Till then we cannot learn philosophy ; for where is it, who possesses it, and how shall we know it ? We can only learn to philosophise, that is, to exercise the talent of reason, according to its general principles, on certain given attempts always, however, with the reservation of the right of reason of investigating the sources of these principles themselves, and of either accepting or rejecting them.
So far the concept of philosophy is only scholastic, as of a system of knowledge which is sought and valued as a science, without aiming at more than a systematical unity of that knowledge, and therefore the logical perfection of it. But there is also a imiversaly or, if we may say so, a cosmical co7icept {conceptits cosmicus) of philosophy, which always formed the real foundation of that name, [p. 839] particularly when it had, as it were, to be personified and represented in the ideal of the philosopher, as the original type. In this sense philosophy is the science of the relation of all knowledge to the essential aims of human reason (teleologia rationis hiimanae), and the philosopher stands before us, not as an artist, but as the lawgiver of
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