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.
synthesis of the understanding, if considered by itself alone, is nothing but the unity of action, of which it is conscious without sensibility also, but through which the understanding is able to determine that sensibility internally, with respect to the manifold which may be given to it (the understanding) according to the form of its intuition.
The understanding, therefore, exercises its activity, under the name of a transcendental synthesis of the faculty of imagination, on the passive subject to which it belongs as a faculty, and we are right in saying that the internal sense is affected by that activity.
The apperception with its synthetical unity is so far from being identical with the internal sense, that, as the source of all synthesis, it rather applies, under the name of the categories, to the manifold of intuitions in general, that is, to objects in general before all sensuous intuition ; while the internal sense, on the contrary, contains the mere form of intuition, but without any connection of the manifold in it, and therefore, as yet, no definite intuition, which becomes possible only through the consciousness of the determination of the internal sense by the transcendental act of the faculty of imagination (the synthetical influence of the understanding on the internal sense) which I have called the figurative synthesis.
This we can always perceive in ourselves. We cannot think a line without drawing it in thought ; we cannot think a circle without describing it ; we cannot represent, at all, the three dimensions of space, without placing, from the same point, three lines perpendicularly on each other ; nay, we cannot even represent time, except by attending, during our drawing a straight line (which is meant to be the external figurative representation of time) to the act of the synthesis of the manifold only by which we successively determine the internal sense, and thereby to the succession of that determination in it. It is really motion, as the act of the subject (not as the determination of an object^), there1 Motion of an object in space does not belong to a pure science, consequently not to geometry, because the fact that a thing is moveable cannot be known a priori, but from experience only. Motion, however, considered as describing a space, is a pure act of successive synthesis of the manifold in
760 Siipplemejit XIV fore the synthesis of the manifold in space (abstraction being made of space, and our attention fixed on the act only by which we determine the internal sense, according to its form), which first produces the very concept of succession. The understanding does not, therefore, y^//(3^ in the internal sense such a connection of the manifold, hMt produces it by affecting the internal sense.
It may seem difficult to understand how the thinking ego can be different from the ego which sees or perceives itself (other modes of intuition being at least conceivable), and yet identical with the latter as the same subject, and how, therefore, I can say : I, as intelligence and thinking subject, know myself as an object thought so far as being given to myself in intuition also, but like other phenomena, not as I am to the understanding, but only as I appear to myself.
In reahty, however, this is neither more nor less difficult than how I can be, to myself, an object, and, more especially, an object of intuition and of internal perceptions.
But that this must really be so, can clearly be shown — if only we admit space to be merely a pure form of the phenomena of the external senses — by the fact that we cannot represent to ourselves time, which is no object of external intuition, in any other way than under the image of a Hne which we draw, a mode of representation without which we could not realise the unity of its dimension ; or again by this other fact that we must always derive the determination of the length of time, or of points of time for all our internal perceptions, from that which is represented to us as changeable by external things, and have therefore to arrange the determinations of the internal sense as phenomena in time, in exactly the same way in which we arrange the determinations of the external senses in space.
If, then, with regard to the latter, we admit that by them we know objects so far only as we are afTected externally, we must also admit, with regard to the internal sense, that by it we only are, or perceive ourselves, as we are internally affected by ourselves, in other words, that with
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