Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason — trans. F. Max Müller
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1 The only thing which might be called an addition, though in the method of proof only, is the new refutation of psychological idealism, and the strict (and as I believe the only possible) proof of the objective reality of external phenomena on p. 275 (Suppl. XXI). That idealism may be considered entirely innocent with respect to the essential aims of metaphysic (though it is not so in reality), yet it remains a scandal to philosophy, and to human reason in general, that we should have to accept the existence of things without us (from which we derive the whole material of knowledge for our own internal sense) on faith only, unable to meet with any satisfactory proof an opponent, who is pleased to doubt it. (See p. 476.) It will probably be urged against this proof that, after all, I am immediately conscious of that only which is within me, that is, of my representation of external things, and that consequently it must still remain uncertain whether there be outside me anything corresponding to it or not. But by internal experience I am conscious of my existence in [p. xlj time (consequently also, of its determinability in time) ; and this is more than to be conscious of my representation only, and yet identical with the empirical consciousness of my existence^ which can be itself determined only by something connected with my existence, yet outside me. This consciousness of my existence in time is therefore connected as identical with the consciousness of relation 2Z
7o6 Supplement II too short for doing more, nor did I, with regard to the [p. xl] rest, meet with any misapprehensions on the part of [p. xh] competent and impartial judges. These, even though I must not name them with that praise which is due to them, will easily perceive in the proper place, that I have paid careful attention to their remarks. ^ [p. xlii]
to something outside me; so that it is experience, and not fiction, sense, and not imagination, which indissolubly connects the external with my internal sense. The external sense is by itself a relation of intuition to something real outside me; and its real, in contradistinction to a purely imaginary character, rests entirely on its being indissolubly connected with internal experience, as being the condition of its possibility.
This is what happens here. If with the intellectual consciousness of my existence in the representation, / am^ which accompanies all my judgments and all acts of my understanding, I could at the same time connect a determination of that existence of mine by means of intellectual intuition, then that determination would not require the consciousness of relation to something outside me.
But although that intellectual consciousness comes first, the inner intuition, in which alone any existence can be determined, is sensuous and dependent on the condition of time; and that determination again, and therefore internal experience itself, depends on something permanent which is not within me, consequently on something outside me only, to which I must consider myself as standing in a certain relation.
Hence the reality of the external sense is necessarily connected, in order to make experience possible at all, with the reality of the internal sense; that is, I am conscious, with the same certainty, that there are things outside me which have a reference to my sense, as that I exist myself in time.
In order to ascertain to what given intuitions objects outside me really correspond (these intuitions belonging to the external sense, and not to the faculty of imagination), we must in each single case apply the rules according to which experience in general (even internal) is distinguished from imaginations, the proposition that there really is an external experience being always taken for granted.
It may be well to add here the remark that the representation of something permanent in existence is not the same as d^permanent representation ; for this (the representation of something permanent in existence) can change and alternate, as all our representations, even those of matter, and may yet refer to something permanent, which must therefore be something external, and different from all my representations, the existence of which is necessarily involved in the determination of my own existence, and constitutes with it but one experience, which could never take place internally, unless (in part) it were external also.
The how admits here of as little explanation as the permanent in time in general, the co-existence of which with the variable produces the concept of change.
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