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

1 Clearness is not, as the logicians maintain, the consciousness of a representation; for a certain degree of consciousness, though insufficient for recol79^ Supplement XXVII the faculty of being conscious of oneself, as well as all other faculties.

The permanence of the soul, therefore, considered merely as an object of the internal sense, remains undemonstrated and undemonstrable, though its permanence in life, while the thinking being (as man) is at the same time to itself an object of the external senses, is clear by itself. But this does not satisfy the rational psychologist, who undertakes to prove, from mere concepts, the absolute permanence of the soul, even beyond this hfe.i lection, must exist, even in many dark representations, because without all consciousness we should make no distinction in the connection of dark representations, which yet we are able to do with the notae of many concepts (such as those of right and justice, or as the musician does who in improvising strikes several keys at once). A representation is clear in which the consciousness is sufficient for a consciousness of its difference from others. If the consciousness is sufficient for distinguishing, but not for a consciousness of the difference, the representation would still have to be called dark. There is, therefore, an infinite number of degrees of consciousness, down to its complete vanishing.

1 Those who, in establishing the possibility of a new theory, imagine that they have done enough if they can show triumphantly that no one can show a contradiction in their premisses (as do those who believe that they understand the possibility of thinking, of which they have an example in the empirical intuitions of human life only, even after the cessation of life) can be greatly embarrassed by other possible theories, which are not a whit bolder than their own. Such is, for instance, the possibility of a division of simple substance into several, or of the coalition of several substances into one simple substance. For although divisibility presupposes a composite, it does not necessarily require a composite of substances, but of degrees only (of the manifold faculties) of one and the same substance. As, then, we may conceive all powers and faculties of the soul, even that of consciousness, as diminished by one-half, the substance still remaining, we may also represent to ourselves, without any contradiction, that extinguished half as preserved, though not within it, but outside it, so that as the whole of what is real in it and has a degree, and therefore the whole existence of it, without any rest, has been halved, another separate substance would arise apart from it. For the plurality, which has been divided, existed before, though not as a plurality of substances, yet of every reality as a quantum of existence in it, and the unity of substance was only a mode of existence, which by mere division lias been changed into a plurality

SiLpplement XXVII 799

If now we take the above propositions in i-i7///^<f//V^/ connection, as indeed they must be taken, as valid for all thinking beings, in a system of rational psychology, and proceed from the category of relation, with the proposition, all thinking beings, as such, are substances, backwards through the series till the circle is completed, we arrive in the end at their existence, and this, according to that system, they are not only conscious of, independently of external things, but are supposed to be able to determine it even of themselves (with respect to that permanence which necessarily belongs to the character of substance). Hence it follows, that in this rationalistic system idealism is inevitable, at least problematical ideahsm, because, if the existence of external things is not required at all for the determination of one's own existence in time, their existence is really a gratuitous assumption of which no proof can ever be given.

If, on the contrary, we proceed analytically, taking the proposition, I think, which involves existence (according to the category