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.
We shall therefore, in what follows, understand by knowledge a priori knowledge which is absolutely independent of all experience, and not of this or that experience only. Opposed to this is empirical knowledge, or such as is possible a posteriori only, that is, by experience. Knowledge a priori, if mixed up with nothing empirical, is called pure. Thus the proposition, for example, that every change has its cause, is a proposition a priori, but not pure : because change is a concept which can only be derived from experience.
II
We are in Possession of Certain Cognitions a priori, and even the Ordinary Understanding is never without theiti
All depends here on a criterion, by which we may safely distinguish between pure and empirical knowledge. Now experience teaches us, no doubt, that something is so or so, but not that it cannot be different. First, then, if we have a proposition, which is thought, together with its necessity, we have a judgment a priori ; and if, besides, it is not derived from any proposition, except such as is itself again considered as necessary, we have an absolutely d; /r/^r/ judgment. Secondly, experience never imparts to its judgments true or strict, but only assumed or relative universality (by means of induction), so that we ought always to say, so far as we have observed hitherto, there is no exception to this
, Supplement IV yiy or that rule. If, therefore, a judgment is thought with strict universaHty, so that no exception is admitted as possible, it is not derived from experience, but vahd absolutely a priori. Empirical universality, therefore, is only an arbitrary extension of a validity which applies to most cases, to one that applies to all : as, for instance, in the proposition, all bodies are heavy.
If, on the contrary, strict universality is essential to a judgment, this always points to a special source of knowledge, namely, a faculty of knowledge a priori. Necessity, therefore, and strict universality are safe criteria of knowledge a priori^ and are inseparable one from the other.
As, however, in the use of these criteria, it is sometimes easier to show the contingency than the empirical limitation ^ of judgments, and as it is sometimes more convincing to prove the unUmited universality which we attribute to a judgment than its necessity, it is advisable to use both criteria separately, each being by itself infaUible.
That there really exist in our knowledge such necessary, and in the strictest sense universal, and therefore pure judgments a priori, is easy to show. If we want a scientific example, we have only to look to any of the propositions of mathematics ; if we want one from the sphere of the ordinary understanding, such a proposition as that each change must have a cause, will answer the purpose ; nay, in the latter case, even the concept of cause contains so clearly the concept of the necessity of its connection with an effect, and of the strict universality of the rule, that it would be destroyed altogether if we attempted to derive it, as Hume does, from the frequent concomitancy of that which happens with that which precedes, and from a habit arising thence (therefore from a purely subjective necessity), of connecting representations. It is possible even, without having recourse to such examples in proof of the reality of pure propositions a priori within our knowledge, to prove their indispensabihty for the possibiHty of experience itself, thus proving it a priori. For whence should experience take its certainty, if all the rules which it follows were always again and again empirical,
1 According to an emendation adopted both by Vaihinger and Adickes.
71 8 Suppleme7it IV and therefore contingent and hardly fit to serve as first principles? For the present, however, we may be satisfied for having shown the pure employment of the faculty of our knowledge as a matter of fact, with the criteria of it.
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