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

2. That the Ego of apperception, and therefore the Ego in every act of thought, is a singular which cannot be dissolved into a plurality of subjects, and that it therefore signifies a logically simple subject, follows from the very concept of thinking, and is consequently an analytical proposition. But this does not mean that a thinking Ego is a simple substance, which would indeed be a synthetical proposition. The concept of substance always relates to intuitions which, with me, cannot be other but sensuous, and which therefore lie completely outside the field of the understanding and its thinking, which alone is intended here, when we say that the Ego, in thinking, is simple. It would indeed be strange, if what elsewhere requires so great an effort, namely, to distinguish in what is given by intuition what is substance, and still more, whether that substance can be simple (as in the case of the component parts of matter), should in our case be given to us so readily in what is really the poorest of all representations, and, as it were, by an act of revelation.

3. The proposition of the identity of myself amidst the manifold of which I am conscious, likewise follows from the concepts themselves, and is therefore analytical ; but the identity of the subject of which, in all its representations, I may become conscious, does not refer to the intuition by which it is given as an object, and cannot therefore signify the identity of the person, by which is understood the consciousness of the identity of one's own substance, as a thinking being, in all the changes of circumstances. In order to prove this, the mere analysis of the proposition, I think, would avail nothing : but different synthetical judgments would be required, which are based on the given intuition.

4. To say that I distinguish my own existence, as that of a thinking being, from other things outside me (one of them being my body) is likewise an analytical proposition ; for ofher things are things which I conceive as different from myself. But, whether such a consciousness of myself is even possible without things outside me, whereby representations are given to me, and whether

Supplement XXVII 795

I could exist merely as a thinking being (without being a man), I do not know at all by that proposition.

Nothing therefore is gained by the analysis of the consciousness of myself, in thought in general, towards the knowledge of myself as an object. The logical analysis of thinking in general is simply mistaken for a metaphysical determination of the object.

It would be a great, nay, even the only objection to the whole of our critique, if there were a possibility of proving a priori that all thinking beings are by themselves simple substances, that as such (as a consequence of the same argument) personality is inseparable from them, and that they are conscious of their existence as distinct from all matter. For we should thus have made a step beyond the world of sense and entered into the field of noumena, and after that no one could dare to question our right of advancing further, of settling in it, and, as each of us is favoured by luck, taking possession of it. The proposition that every thinking being is, as such, a simple substance, is synthetical a priori^ because, first, it goes beyond the concept on which it rests, and adds to act of thinking in general the mode of existence ; and secondly, because it adds to that concept a predicate (simplicity) which cannot be given in any experience. Hence synthetical propositions a priori would be not only admissible, as we maintained, in reference to objects of possible experience, and then only as principles of the possibility of that experience, but could be extended to things in general and to things by themselves, a result which would put an end to the whole of our critique, and bid us to leave everything as we found it. However, the danger is not so great, if only we look more closely into the matter.

In this process of rational psychology, there lurks a paralogism, which may be represented by the following syllogism.

That which cannot be conceived otherwise than as a subject, does not exist otherwise than as a subject, and is therefore a substance.

A thinking being, considered as such, cannot be conceived otherwise than as a subject.