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

This unity of apperception with reference to [p. 119] the synthesis of imagination is the understanding, and the same unity with reference to the transcendental synthesis of the imagination, the pttre understanding: It must be admitted therefore that there exist in the understanding pure forms of knowledge a priori, which contain the necessary unity of the pure synthesis of the imagination in reference to all possible phenomena. These are the categories, that is, the pure concepts of the understanding. The empirical faculty of knowledge of man contains therefore by necessity an understanding which refers to all objects of the senses, though by intuition only, and by its synthesis through u

98 Transcendental Aitalytic imagination, and all phenomena, as data of a possible experience, must conform to that understanding. As this relation of phenomena to a possible experience is likewise necessary, (because, without it, we should receive no knowledge through them, and they would not in the least concern us), it follows that the pure understanding constitutes by the means of the categories a formal and synthetical principle of all experience, and that phenomena have thus a necessary relation to the understanding.

We shall now try to place the necessary connection of the understanding with the phenomena by means of the categories more clearly before the reader, by beginning with the beginning, namely, with the empirical.

The first that is given us is the phe7iomenoii, [p. 120] which, if connected with consciousness, is called perception. (Without its relation to an at least possible consciousness, the phenomenon could never become to us an object of knowledge. It would therefore be nothing to us ; and because it has no objective re;^lity in itself, but exists only in Joeing known, it would be nothing altogether.) As every phenomenon contains a manifold, and different perceptions are found in the mind singly and scattered^ a connection of them is necessary, such as they cannot have in the senses by themselves. There exists therefore in us an active power for the synthesis of the manifold which we' call imagination, and the function of which, as applied to perceptions, I call apprehension} This imagination

1 It has hardly struck any psychologist that this imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception. This was partly owing to their confining this faculty to reproduction, partly to our belief that the senses do not only give us impressions, but compound them also for us, thus producing pictures of objects. This, however, beyond our receptivity of impressions, requires something more, namely, a function for their synthesis.

Transcendental Analytic 99

is meant to change the^.manif old of intuition into an image, it must therefore first receive the impressions into its activity, which I call, to a^^pxeitend.

It must be clear, however, that even this appre- [p. 121] hension of the manifold could not alone produce a cohe- ^i:ence of impressions or an image, without some subjective power of calling one perception from which the mind has gone over to another back to that which follows, and thus forming whole series of perceptions. This is the reproductive faculty of imagination which is and can be empirical only.

If representations, as they happen to meet with one another, could reproduce each other at haphazard, they would have no definite coherence, but would form irregular agglomerations only, and never produce knowledge. It is necessary therefore that their reproduction should be subject to a rule by which one representation connects itself in imagination with a second and not with a third. It is this subjective and empirical ground of reproduction according to rules, which is called the association of representations.

If this unity of association did not possess an objective foundation also, which makes it impossible that phenomena should be apprehended by imagination in any other way but under the condition of a possible synthetical unity of that apprehension, it would be a mere accident that phenomena lend themselves to a certain connection in human knowledge. Though we might have the power of associating perceptions, it would still be a matter of [p. 122] uncertainty and chance whether they themselves are associable ; and, in case they should not be so, a number of perceptions, nay, the whole of our sensibility, might possi100 Transcendental Analytic