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

This cannot happen, however, according to our principle of the ideality of all sensuous intuitions ; on the contrary, it is only when we attribute objective reality to those forms of intuition that everything is changed inevitably into mere illusion.

For if we take space and time as properties that ought to exist as possible in things by themselves, and then survey the absurdities in which we should be involved in having to admit that two infinite things, which are not substances, nor something inherent in substances, but nevertheless must be something existing, nay, the necessary condition of the existence of all things, would remain, even if all existing things were removed, we really cannot blame the good Bishop Berkeley for degrading bodies to mere illusion.

Nay, it would follow that even our own existence, which would thus be made dependent on the independent reality of such a non-entity as time, must become a mere illusion, an absurdity which hitherto no one has been guilty of.

IV. In natural theology, where we think of an object which not only can never be an object of intuition to us, but which even to itself can never be an object of sensuous intuition, great care is taken to remove all conditions of space and time from its intui1 Phenomenal predicates can be attributed to the object in its relation to our sense : as for instance to the rose its red colour, and its scent. But what is merely illusion can never be attributed to an object as a predicate, for the simple reason that the illusion attributes to the object by itself something which belongs to it only in its relation to the senses, or to a subject in general : as for instance the two handles, which were formerly attributed to Saturn. That which is never to be found in the object itself, but always in its relation to a subject, and is inseparable from its representation by a subject, is phenomenal, and the predicates of space and time are therefore rightly attributed to objects of the senses, as such. In this there is no illusion. If, on the contrary, I were to attribute to the rose by itself xtdues?,, handles to Saturn, and extension to all external objects, without restricting my judgment to the relation of these objects to a subject, we should have illusion.

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tion (for all its knowledge must be intuitive, and not thought^ which always involves limitation). But how are we justified in doing this, when we have first made space and time forms of things by themselves, such as would remain as conditions of the existence of things a priori, even if the things themselves had been removed ? If conditions of all existence, they would also be conditions of the existence of God.

If we do not wish to change space and time into objective forms of all things, nothing remains but to accept them as subjective forms of our external as well as internal intuition, which is called sensuous, for the very reason that it is not originally spontaneous, that is such, that it could itself give us the existence of the objects of intuition (such an intuition, so far as we can understand, can belong to the First Being only), but dependent on the existence of objects, and therefore possible only, if the faculty of representation in the subject is affected by them.