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

And yet this need not be a principle for every possible understanding, but only for that which gives nothing manifold through its pure apperception in the representation, / am. An understanding which through its self-consciousness could give the manifold of intuition, and by whose representation the objects of that representation should at the same time exist, would not require a special act of the synthesis of the manifold for the unity of its consciousness, while the human understanding, which possesses the power of thought only, but not of intuition, requires such an act. To the human understanding that first principle is so indispensable that it really cannot form the least concept of any other possible understanding, whether it be intuitive by itself, or possessed of a sensuous intuition, different from that in space and time.

§ i8 What is the Objective Unity of Self-consciousness ?

The transcendental unity of apperception connects all the manifold given in an intuition into a concept of an object. It is therefore called objective, and must be distinguished from the s^ibjective iniity of consciousness, which is a form of the internal sense, by which the manifold of intuition is empirically given, to be thus connected. Whether I can become empirically conscious of the manifold, as either simultaneous or successive, depends on circumstances, or empirical conditions. The empirical unity of consciousness, therefore, through the association of representations, is itself phenomenal and wholly contingent, while the pure form of intuition in time, merely as general intuition containing the manifold that is given, is subject to the original unity of the consciousness, through the necessary relation only of the manifold of intuition to the one, / think, — that is, through the pure synthesis of the understanding, which forms the a priori ground of the empiriSupplement XIV 751 cal synthesis. That unity alone is, therefore, vaUd objectively; the empirical unity of apperception, which we do not consider here, and which is only derived from the former, under given conditions iii concreto, has subjective validity only. One man connects the representation of a word with one thing, another with another, and the unity of consciousness, with regard to what is empirical, is not necessary nor universally valid with reference to that which is given.

§ 19

The Logical Form of all Judgjnejits consists in the Objective Unity of Apperception of the Concepts contained therein

I could never feel satisfied with the definition of a judgment in general, given by our logicians, who say that it is the representation of a relation between two concepts. Without disputing with them in this place as to the defect of that explanation, that it may possibly apply to categorical, but not to hypothetical and disjunctive judgments (the latter containing, not a relation of concepts, but of judgments themselves), — though many tedious consequences have arisen from this mistake of logicians, — I must at least make this observation, that we are not told in what that relation consists.^

But, if I examine more closely the relation of given cognitions in every judgment, and distinguish it, as belonging to the understanding, from the relation according to the rules of reproductive imagination (which has subjective validity only), I find that a judgment is nothing but the mode of bringing given cognitions

1 The lengthy doctrine of the four syllogistic figures concerns categorical syllogisms only, and though it is really nothing but a trick for obtaining the appearance of more modes of concluding than that of the first figure, by secretly introducing immediate conclusions (^consequentiae unniediatae) among the premisses of a pure syllogism, this would hardly have secured its great success, had not its authors succeeded, at the same time, in estabhshing the exclusive authority of categorical judgments, as those to which all others must be referred. This as we showed in § 9, p. 62, is wrong.

752 Siipple^nent XIV