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.
The manifold of representations may be given in an intuition which is purely sensuous, that is, nothing but receptivity, and the form of that intuition may lie a priori in our faculty of representation, without being anything but the manner in which a subject is affected. But the connection {conjunction of anything manifold can never enter into us through the senses, and cannot be contained, therefore, already in^the pure form of sensuous intuition, for it is a spontaneous act of the power of representation ; and as, in order to distinguish this from sensibility, we must call it understanding, we see that all connecting, whether we are conscious of it or not, and whether we connect the manifold of intuition or several concepts together, and again, whether that intuition be sensuous or not sensuous, is an act of the understanding. This act we shall call by the general name of synthesis, in order to show that we cannot represent to ourselves anything as connected in the object, without having previously connected it ourselves, and that of all representations cofinection is the only one which cannot be given through the objects, but must be carried out by
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Supplement XIV 745
the subject itself, because it is an act of its spontaneity. It can , be easily perceived that this act must be originally one and the \ same for every kind of connection, and that its dissolution, that is, the analysis, which seems to be its opposite, does always presuppose it. For where the understanding has not previously connected, there is nothing for it to disconnect, because, as connected, it could only be given by the understanding to the faculty of representation.
But the concept of connection includes, besides the concept of the manifold and the synthesis of it, the concept of the unity of the manifold also. Connection is representation of the synthetical unity of the manifold.^
The representation of that unity cannot therefore be the result of the connection ; on the contrary, the concept of the connection becomes first possible by the representation of unity being added to the representation of the manifold. And this unity, which precedes a priori 2SS. concepts of connection, must not be mistaken for that category of unity of which we spoke on p. d^ ; for all categories depend on logical functions in judgments, and in these we have already connection, and therefore unity of given concepts. The category, therefore, presupposes connection, and we must consequently look still higher for this unity as qualitative (see Suppl. XII. § 12), in that, namely, which itself contains the ground for the unity of different concepts in judgments, that is, the ground for the very possibility of the understanding, even in its logical employment.
§ 16
The Original Synthetical Unity of Apperception
It must be possible that the / think should accompany all my representations : for otherwise something would be represented
1 Whether the representations themselves are identical, and whether therefore one can be thought analytically by the other, is a matter of no consequence here. The consciousness of the one has always to be distinguished from the consciousness of the other, so far as the manifold is concerned ; and everything here depends on the synthesis only of this (possible) consciousness.
74^ Supplement XIV within me that could not be thought, in other words, the representation would either be impossible or nothing, at least so far as I am concerned. That representation which can be given before all thought, is called intuition^ and all the manifold of intuition has therefore a necessary relation to the / think in the same subject in which that manifold of intuition is found. That representation, however (that / think), is an act of spontaneity, that is, it cannot be considered as belonging to sensibility. I call it pure apperception, in order to distinguish it from empirical apperception, or original apperception also, because it is that self-consciousness which by producing the representation, / think (which must accompany all others, and is one and the same in every act of consciousness), cannot itself be accompanied by any other. I also call the unity of it the transcendental unity of self-consciousness, in order to indicate that it contains the possibility of knowledge a priori.
For the manifold representations given in any intuition would not all be my representations, if they did not all belong to one self-consciousness. What I mean is that, as my representations (even though I am not conscious of them as such), they must be in accordance with that condition, under which alone they can stand together in one common self-consciousness, because otherwise they would not all belong to me. From this original connection the following important conclusions can be deduced.
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