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.
It is of the highest importance to isolate various sorts of knowledge, which in kind and origin are different from others, and to take great care lest they be mixed up with those others with which, for practical purposes, they are generally united. What is done by the chemist in the analysis of substances, and by the mathematician in pure mathematics, is far more incumbent on the philosopher, in order to enable him to define clearly the part which, in the promiscuous employment of the understanding, belongs to a special kind of knowledge, as well as its peculiar value and influence. Human reason, therefore, since it first began to think, or rather to reflect, has never been able to do without a metaphysic, but it has never kept it sufficiently free from all foreign admixture. The idea of a science of this kind is as old as speculation itself, and what human reason does not speculate, whether in a scholastic or a popular manner t It must be admitted, however, that even thinkers by profession did [p. 843] not clearly distinguish between the two elements of our knowledge, the one being in our possession completely a
6^]^ Architectonic of Pure Reason priori^ the other deducible a posteriori only from experience, and did not succeed therefore in fixing -the limits of a special kind of knowledge, nor in realising the true idea of a science which had so long and so deeply engaged the interest of human reason. When it was said that metaphysic is the science of the first principles of human knowledge, this did not mark out any special kind of knowledge, but only a certain rank or degree, with regard to its character of generality, which was not sufficient to distinguish it clearly from empirical knowledge. For among empirical principles also, some are more general, and therefore higher than others ; and in such a series of subordinated principles (where that which is entirely a priori is not distinguished from that which is known a posteriori only), where should one draw the line to separate the first part from the last, and the higher members from the lower ? What should we say if chronology should distinguish the epochs of history no better than by dividing it into the first centuries and the subsequent centuries ? We should ask, no doubt, whether the fifth or the tenth belongs to the first centuries ? and I ask in the same way whether the concept of what is extended belongs to metaphysic ? If you say, yes ! I ask, what about the concept of a body ? and of a liquid body ? You then hesitate, for you [p. 844] begin to see, that if I continue in this strain, everything would belong to metaphysic. It thus becomes clear that the mere degree of subordination of the special under the general cannot determine the limits of a science ; but, in our case, only the complete difference in kind and origin. The fundamental idea of metaphysic was obscured on another side because, as
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knowledge a priori, it showed a certain similarity in kind with mathematics. The two are, no doubt, related with regard to their origin a priori, but, if we consider how, in metaphysic, knowledge is derived from concepts, while in mathematics we can only form judgments through the construction of concepts a priori, we discover, in comparing philosophical with mathematical knowledge, the most decided difference in kind, which was no doubt always felt, but never determined by clear criteria. Thus it has happened that, as philosophers themselves blundered in developing the idea of their science, its elaboration could have no definite aim, and no certain guidance ; and we may well understand how metaphysical science was brought into contempt in the outside world, and at last among philosophers themselves, considering how arbitrarily it had been designed, and how constantly those very philosophers, ignorant as to the path which they ought to take, were disputing among themselves about the discoveries which each asserted he had made on his own peculiar path. [p. 845]
All pure knowledge a priori constitutes, therefore, according to the special faculty of knowledge in which alone it can originate, a definite unity ; and metaphysic is that philosophy which is meant to represent that knowledge in its systematical unity. Its speculative part, which has especially appropriated that name, namely, what we call metaphysic of nature, in which everything is considered from concepts a priori, so far as it is (not so far as it ought to be), will have to be divided in the following manner.
Metaphysic, in the more limited sense of the word, consists of transcendental philosophy and the physiology
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