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

understanding. If it were to attempt to show in general how anything should be arranged under these rules, and how we should determine whether something falls under them or not, this could only take place by means of a new rule.

This, because it is a new rule, requires a new precept for the faculty of judgment, and we thus learn that, though the understanding is capable of being improved and instructed by means of rules, the faculty of judgment is a special talent which cannot be taught, but must be practised. This is what constitutes our so-called motherwit, the absence of which cannot be remedied by any schooling.

For although the teacher may offer, and as it were graft into a narrow understanding, plenty of rules "iDorrowed from the experience of others, the faculty of using them rightly must belong to the pupil himself, and without that talent no precept that may be given is safe from abuse. ^ A physician, therefore, a judge, or [p. 134] a politician, may carry in his head many beautiful pathological, juridical, or political rules, nay, he may even become an accurate teacher of them, and he may yet in the application of these rules commit many a blunder, either because he is deficient in judgment, though not in understanding, knowing the general in the abstract, but unable to determine whether a concrete case falls under it ; or, it may be, because his judgment has not been sufficiently trained by examples and practical experience. It is the

1 Deficiency in the faculty of judgment is really what we call stupidity, and there is no remedy for that. An obtuse and narrow mind, deficient in nothing but a proper degree of understanding and correct concepts, may be improved by study, so far as to become even learned. But as even then there is often a deficiency of judgment (^secunda Petri) we often meet with very learned men, who in handling their learning betray that original deficiency which can never be mended.

iio Transcendental Analytic one great advantage of examples that they sharpen the faculty of judgment, but they are apt to impair the accuracy and precision of the understanding, because they fulfil but rarely the conditions of the rule quite adequately (as casus in terminis\ Nay, they often weaken the effort of the understanding in comprehending rules according to their general adequacy, and independent of the special circumstances of experience, and accustom us to use those rules in the end as formulas rather than as principles. Examples may thus be called the go-cart of the judgment, which those who are deficient in that natural talent^ can never do without.

But although general logic can give no pre- [p. 135] cepts to the faculty of judgment, the case is quite different with transcendental logic, so that it even seems as if it were the proper business of the latter to correct and to establish by definite rules the faculty of the judgment in the use of the pure understanding. For as a doctrine and a means of enlarging the field of pure knowledge a priori for the benefit of the understanding, philosophy does not seem necessary, but rather hurtful, because, in spite of all attempts that have been hitherto made, hardly a single inch of ground has been gained by it. For critical purposes, however, and in order to guard the faculty of judgment against mistakes {lapsns jiidicii^ in its use of the few pure concepts of the understanding which we possess, philosophy (though its benefits may be negative only) has to employ all the acuteness and penetration at its command.

^ Desselben has been changed into derselben in later editions. Desselben, however, may be meant to refer to Urtheil, as contained in Urtheilskraft. The second edition has desselben.

Transcendental Analytic 1 1 1