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.
But this figurative synthesis, if it refers to the original synthetical unity of apperception only, that is, to that transcendental unity which is thought in the categories, must be called the transcendental synthesis of the faculty of imagination, in order thus to distinguish it from the purely intellectual synthesis. Imagination is the faculty of representing an object even without its presence in intuition. As all our intuition is sensuous, the faculty of imagination belongs, on account of the subjective condition under which alone it can give a corresponding intuition to the concepts of the understanding, to our sensibility. As, however, its synthesis
758 Supplement XIV is an act of spontaneity, determining, and not, like the .senses, determinable only, and therefore able to determine a priori the senses, so far as their form is concerned, according to the unity of apperception, the faculty of imagination is, so far, a faculty of determining our sensibility a priori, so that the synthesis of the intuitions, according to the categories, must be the transcendental synthesis of the faculty of imagination.
This is an effect, produced by the understanding on our sensibility, and the first application of it (and at the same time the ground of all others) to objects of the intuition which is only possible to us. As figurative, it is distinguished from the intellectual synthesis, which takes place by the understanding only, without the aid of the faculty of imagination.
In so far as imagination is spontaneity, I call it occasionally productive imagination : distinguishing it from the reproductive, which in its synthesis is subject to empirical laws only, namely, those of association, and which is of no help for the explanation of the possibility of knowledge a priori, belonging, therefore, to psychology, and not to transcendental philosophy.
This is the proper place for trying to account for the paradox, which must have struck everybody in our exposition of the form of the internal sense (§ 6, see p. 28) ; namely, how that sense represents to the consciousness even ourselves, not as we are by ourselves, but as we appear to ourselves, because we perceive ourselves only as we are affected internally. This seems to be contradictory, because we should thus be in a passive relation to ourselves ; and for this reason the founders of the systems of psychology have preferred to represent the internal sense as identical with the faculty of apperception, while we have carefully distinguished the two.
What determines the internal sense is the understanding, and its original power of connecting the manifold of intuition, that is, of bringing it under one apperception, this being the very ground of the possibility of the understanding. As in us men the understanding is not itself an intuitive faculty, and could not, even if intuitions were given in our sensibility, take them into itself, in order to connect, as it were, the manifold of its own intuition, the
Sicpplement XIV 759
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