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 not necessary, moreover, that we should limit this intuition in space and time to the sensibility of man ; it is quite possible that all finite thinking beings must necessarily agree with us on this point (though we cannot decide this) . On account of this universal character, however, it does not cease to be sensibility, for it always is, and remains derivative {intuitus derivativus), not original {intuitus origiiiarius) , and therefore not intellectual intuition. For the reason mentioned before, the latter intuition seems only to belong to the First Being, and never to one which is dependent, both in its existence and its intuition (which intuition determines its existence with reference to given objects). This latter remark, however, must only be taken as an illustration of our aesthetic theory, and not as a proof.
Conclusion of the Transcendental Esthetic
Here, then, we have one of the requisites for the solution of the general problem of transcendental philosophy. How are synthetical propositions a priori possible ? namely, pure intuitions a prio?'i, space and time. In them we find, if in a judgment a priori
p. 736
Supplement XI
we want to go beyond a given concept, that which can be discovered a priori, not in the concept, but in the intuition corresponding to it, and can be connected with it synthetically. For this very reason, however, such judgments can never go beyond the objects of the senses, but are valid only for objects of possible experience.
SUPPLEMENT XII
[See vol. ii. p. 74]
§11
This table of categories suggests some interesting considerations, which possibly may have important consequences with regard to the scientific form of all knowledge of reason. For it is clear that such a table will be extremely useful, nay, indispensable, in the theoretical part of philosophy, in order to trace the complete plan of a whole science, so far as it rests on concepts a priori, and to divide it systematically according to fixed principles, because that table contains all elementary concepts of the understanding in their completeness, nay, even the form of a system of them in the human understanding, and indicates therefore all the momenta of a projected speculative science, nay, even their order. Of this I have given an example elsewhere.^ Here follow some of the considerations.
The first is, that this table, which contains four classes of the concepts of the understanding, may, in the first instance, be divided into two sections, the former of which refers to objects of intuition (pure, as well as empirical), the latter to the existence of those objects (either in their relation to each other, or to the understanding).
The first section I shall call that of the mathematical, the second, that of the dynamical categories. The first section has no correlates, which are met with in the second section only. Must not this difference have some ground in the nature of the understanding ?
Our second remark is, that in every class there is the same number of categories, namely three, which again makes us ponder,
1 Metaphysical Elements of Natural Science. 3K 737
73^ Supplement XII because generally all division a priori by means of concepts must be dichotomy. It should be remarked also, that the third category always arises from the combination of the second with the first. Thus totality is nothing but plurality considered as unity ; limitation nothing but reality connected with negation ; community is the casuaUty of a substance as determining another reciprocally ; lastly, necessity, the existence which is given by possibility itself. It must not be supposed, however, that therefore the third category is only a derivative, and not a primary concept of the pure understanding. For the joining of the first and second concepts, in order to produce the third, requires an independent act of the understanding, which is not identical with the act that produces the first and second concepts. Thus the concept of a number (which belongs to the category of totality) is not always possible when we have the concepts of plurahty and unity (for instance, in the concept of the infinite) ; nor can we understand by simply combining the concept of a cause and that of a substafice, the influence, that is, how a substance can become the cause of something in another substance. This shows that a separate act of the understanding is here required, and the same applies to all the rest.
Third observation. With regard to one category, namely, that of community, which is found in the third class, its accordance with the form of a disjunctive judgment, which corresponds to it in the table of logical functions, is not so evident as elsewhere.
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