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

If, therefore, we attempted to apply the categories to objects which are not considered as phenomena, we should have to admit an intuition other than the sensuous, and thus the object would become a noumenon in a positive sense. As, however, such an intuition, namely, an intellectual one, is entirely beyond our faculty of knowledge, the use of the categories also can never reach beyond the hmits of the objects of experience. Beings of the understanding correspond no doubt to beings of the senses, and there may be beings of the understanding to which our faculty of sensuous intuition has no relation at all ; but our concepts of the understanding, being forms of thought for our sensuous intuition only, do not reach so far, and what is called by us a noumenon must be understood as such in a negative sense only.

SUPPLEMENT XXV

[See vol. ii. p. 223]

We must not speak, as is often done, of an intellectual world, for intellectual and sensitive apply to knowledge only. That, however, to which the one or the other mode of intuition applies, that is, the objects themselves, must, however harsh it may sound, be called intelligible or sensible.

p. 791

SUPPLEMENT XXVI

[See vol. ii. p. 293]

Metaphysic has for the real object of its investigations three ideas only, God, Freedom, and InDfiortality ; the second concept connected with the first leading by necessity to the third as conclusion. Everything else treated by that science is a means only in order to establish those ideas and their reality. Metaphysic does not require these ideas for the sake of natural science ; but in order to go beyond nature. A right insight into them would make theology, morality, and, by the union of both, religion also, therefore the highest objects of our existence, dependent on the speculative faculty of reason only, and on nothing else. In a systematical arrangement of those ideas the above order, being synthetical, would be the most appropriate ; but in their elaboration, which must necessarily come first, the a7ialytical or inverse order is more practical, enabling us, by starting from what is given us by experience, namely, the study of the soul (psychology), and proceeding thence to the study of the world (cosmology), and lastly, to a knowledge of God (theology), to carry out the whole of our great plan in its entirety.

p. 792

SUPPLEMENT XXVII

[See vol. ii. p. 303]

We shall therefore follow it with a critical eye through all the predicaments of pure psychology ; but we shall, for the sake of brevity, let their examination proceed uninterruptedly.

The following general remark may at the very outset make us more attentive to this mode of syllogism. I do not know any object by merely thinking, but only by determining a given intuition with respect to that unity of consciousness in which all thought consists ; therefore, I do not know myself by being conscious of myself, as thinking, but only if I am conscious of the intuition of myself as determined with respect to the function of thought. All modes of self-consciousness in thought are therefore by themselves not yet concepts of understanding of objects (categories), but mere logical functions, which present no object to our thought to be known, and therefore do not present myself either as an object to be known. It is not a consciousness of the determining^ but only that of the determinable self, that is, of my internal intuition (so far as the manifold in it can be connected in accordance with the general condition of the unity of apperception in thought) which forms the object.

I. In all judgments I am always the determining subject onXy of the relation which constitutes the judgment. That I, who think, can be considered in thinking as subject only, and as something not simply inherent in the thinking, as predicate, is an apodictical and even identical proposition ; but it does not mean that, as an object, I am a self-dependent being or a substance. The latter would be saying a great deal, and requires for its support data which are not found in the thinking, perhaps (so far as

p. 793

794 Siipplemeiit XXVII

I consider only the thinking subject as such) more than I shall ever find in it.