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

tive reason.

In the execution of this plan, as traced out by the critique, that is, in a future system of metaphysic, we shall have to follow in the strict method of the celebrated Wolf, the greatest of all dogmatic philosophers, who first showed (and by his example called forth, in Germany, that spirit of thoroughness, which is not yet extinct) how the secure method of a science could be attained only by a legitimate establishment of principles, a clear definition of concepts, an attempt at strictness of proof, and an avoidance of all bold combinations in concluding.

He was therefore most eminently qualified to raise metaphysics to the dignity of a science, if it had only occurred to him, by criticism of the organum, namely, of pure reason itself, first to prepare his field, — an omission to be ascribed, not so much to himself as to the dogmatical [p. xxxvii] spirit of his age, and with regard io which the philosophers of his own, as well as of all previous times, have no right to reproach each other.

Those who reject, at the same time, the method of Wolf, and the procedure of the critique of pure reason, can have no other aim but to shake off the fetters of science altogether, and thus to change work into play, conviction into opinion, and philosophy into philodoxy.

With regard to this second edition, I have tried, as was but fair, to do all I could in order to remove, as far as possible, the difficulties and obscurities which, not perhaps without my fault, have misled even acute thinkers in judging of my book. In the propositions themselves, and their proofs, likewise in the form and completeness of the whole plan, I have found nothing to alter, which is due partly to the long-continued examination to which I had subjected them, before submitting them to the public, and partly to the nature of the subject itself. For pure speculative reason is so constituted that it forms a true organism, in which everything is organic, the whole being there for the [p. xxxviii] sake of every part, and every part for the sake of the whole, so that the smallest imperfection, whether a fault or a deficiency, must inevitably betray itself in use. I venture to hope that this

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system will maintain itself unchanged for the future also.

It is not self-conceit which justifies me in this confidence, but the experimental evidence produced by the identity of the result, whether we proceed progressively from the smallest elements to the whole of pure reason, or retrogressively from the whole (for this also is given by the practical objects of reason) to every single part ; the fact being, that an attempt at altering even the smallest item produces at once contradictions, not only in the system, but in human reason in general.

With regard to the style^ however, much remains to be done ; and for that purpose, I have endeavoured to introduce several improvements into this second edition, which are intended to remove, first, misapprehensions in the Esthetic, especially with regard to the concept of time : secondly, obscurities in the' deduction of the concepts of the understanding : thirdly, a supposed want of sufficient evidence, in proving the propositions of the pure understanding : fourthly, the false interpretation put on the paralogisms with which we charged rational psychology.

To this point (only to the end of the first chapter of transcendental Dialectic) do the changes [p. xxxix] of style and representation^ extend, and no further. Time was