Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason — trans. F. Max Müller
The text is shown on its own: no facing layer is held for this issue.
The translator’s English as printed (F. Max Müller). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.
of knowledge which is meant to refer to objects, requires quite as much an explanation as to the possibility of such a reference, it is necessary for us to consider the subjective sources which form the foundation a priori for the possibility of experience, not according to their empirical, but according to their transcendental character.
If every single representation stood by itself, as if isolated and separated from the others, nothing like what we call knowledge could ever arise, because knowledge forms a whole of representations connected and compared with each other. If therefore I ascribe to the senses a synopsis, because in their intuition they contain something manifold, there corresponds to it always a synthesis, and receptivity can make knowledge possible only when joined with spontaneity. This spontaneity, now, appears as a threefold synthesis which must necessarily take place in every kind of knowledge, namely, first, that of the apprehension of representations as modifications of the soul in intuition, secondly, of the reproduction of them in the imagination, and, thirdly, that of their recognition in concepts. This leads us to three subjective sources of knowledge which render possible the understanding, and through it all experience as an empirical product of the understanding. [p. 98]
Preliminary Remark
The deduction of the categories is beset with so many difficulties and obliges us to enter so deeply into the first grounds of the possibility of our knowledge in general, that I thought it more expedient, in order to avoid the lengthiness of a complete theory, and yet to omit nothing in so essential an investigation, to add the following four
82 Transcendental Analytic I paragraphs with a view of preparing rather than instructing the reader. After that only I shall in the third section proceed to a systematical discussion of chese elements of the understanding. Till then the reader must not allow himself to be frightened by a certain amount of obscurity which at first is inevitable on a road never trodden before, but which, when we come to that section, will give way, I hope, to a complete comprehension.
Of the Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition
Whatever the origin of our representations may be, whether they be due to the influence of external things or to internal causes, whether they have arisen a prioi'i or empirically as phenomena, as modifications of the mind they must always belong to the internal [p. 99] sense, and all our knowledge must therefore finally be subject to the formal condition of that internal sense, namely, time, in which they are all arranged, joined, and brought into certain relations to each other. This is a general remark which must never be forgotten in all that follows.
Every representation contains something manifold, which could not be represented as such, unless the mind distinguished the time in the succession of one impression after another ; for as contained in one moment, each representation can never be anything but absolute unity. In order to change this manifold into a unity of intuition (as, for instance, in the representation of space), it is necessary first to run through the manifold and then to hold it together. It is this
Transcendental Analytic 83
act which I call the synthesis of apprehension, because it refers directly to intuition which no doubt offers something manifold, but which, without a synthesis, can never make it such, as it is contained in one representation.
This synthesis of apprehension must itself be carried out a priori also, that is, with reference to representations which are not empirical. For without it we should never be able to have the representations either of space or time ^ /n^;V, because these cannot be produced except [p. 100] by a synthesis of the manifold which the senses offer in their original receptivity. It follows therefore that we have a pure synthesis of apprehension.
II
Of the Synthesis of Reproduction in Imagination
It is no doubt nothing but an empirical law according to which representations which have often followed or accompanied one another, become associated in the end and so closely united that, even without the presence of the object, one of these representations will, according to an invariable law, produce a transition of the mind to the other. This law of reproduction, however, presupposes that the phenomena themselves are really subject to such a rule, and that there is in the variety of these representations a sequence and concomitancy subject to certain rules ; for without this the faculty of empirical imagination would never find anything to do that it is able to do, and remain therefore buried within our mind as a dead faculty, unknown to ourselves. If cinnabar were sometimes red and sometimes black, sometimes light and sometimes heavy, if a man could be changed now into
84 Transce7idental Analytic
No commentary for this page under the selected tracks.
There is commentary on page 1.