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

Or if, to take another example, I perceive the freezing of water, I apprehend two states (that of fluidity and that of solidity), and these as standing to each other in a relation of time. But in the time, which as internal intuition 1 make the foundation of the phenomenon, I represent to myself necessarily synthetical unity of the manifold, without which that relation could not be given as determined in an intuition (with reference to the succession of time). That synthetical unity, however, as a condition a priori, under which I connect the manifold of any intuition, turns out to be, if I make abstraction of the permanent form of my intuition, namely, of time, the category of cause, through which, if I apply \ to my sensibility, I determine everything that happens, according t\ its relation in time. Thus the apprehension in such an event, a/id that event itself considered as a possible perception, is subject to the concept of the relation of cause and effect. The same applies to all other cases.

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Categories are concepts which a priori prescribe laws to all phenomena, and therefore to nature as the sum total of all phenomena {natura materialiter spectata). The question therefore

1 In this manner it is proved that the synthesis of apprehension, which is empirical, must necessarily conform to the synthesis of apperception, which is intellectual, and contained in the category entirely a priori. It is one and the same spontaneity, which there, under the name of imagination, and here, under the name of understanding, brings connection into the manifold of intuition.

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arises, as these laws are not derived from nature, nor conform to it as their model (in which case they would be empirical only), how we can understand that nature should conform to them, that is, how they can determine a priori \\\t connection of the manifold in nature, without taking that connection from nature. The solution of that riddle is this.

It is no more surprising that the laws of phenomena in nature must agree with the understanding and its form a priori, that is, with its power of connecting the manifold in general, than that the phenomena themselves must agree with the form of sensuous intuition a priori.

For laws exist as little in phenomena themselves, but relatively only, with respect to the subject to which, so far as it has understanding, the phenomena belong, as phenomena exist by themselves, but relatively only, with respect to the same being so far as it has senses. Things by themselves would necessarily possess their conformity to the law, independent also of any understanding by which they are known.

But phenomena are only representations of things, unknown as to what they may be by themselves. As mere representations they are subject to no law of connection, except that which is prescribed by the connecting faculty. Now that which connects the manifold of sensuous intuition is the faculty of imagination, which receives from the understanding the unity of its intellectual synthesis, and from sensibility the manifoldness of apprehension.

Thus, as all possible perceptions depend on the synthesis of apprehension, and that synthesis itself, that empirical synthesis, depends on the transcendental, and, therefore, on the categories, it follows that all possible perceptions, everything in fact that can come to the empirical consciousness, that is, all phenomena of nature, must, so far as their connection is concerned, be subject to the categories.

On these categories, therefore, nature (considered as nature in general) depends, as on the original ground of its necessary conformity to law (as natura formaliter spec ta fa). Beyond the laws, on which nature in general^ as a lawful order of phenomena in space and time depends, the pure faculty of the understanding is incapable of prescribing a priori, by means of mere categories, laws to phenomena. Special laws, therefore, as they refer to phenomena which are empirically