Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason — trans. F. Max Müller
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The translator’s English as printed (F. Max Müller). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.
experience, on which alone the objective vaUdity of their synthesis is founded.
As therefore experience, being an empirical synthesis, is in its possibility the only kind of knowledge that imparts reality to every other synthesis, this other synthesis, as knowledge a priori, possesses truth (agreement with its object) on this condition only, that it contains nothing beyond what is necessary for the synthetical [p. 158] unity of experience in general.
The highest principle of all synthetical judgments is therefore this, that every object is subject to the necessary conditions of a synthetical unity of the manifold of intuition in a possible experience.
Thus synthetical judgments a priori are possible, if we refer the formal conditions of intuition a priori, the synthesis of imagination, and the necessary unity of it in a transcendental apperception, to a possible knowledge in general, given in experience, and if we say that the conditions of the possibility of experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience themselves, and thus possess objective validity in a synthetical judgment a priori.
SYSTEM OF THE PRINCIPLES OF THE PURE UNDERSTANDING
Section III
Systematical Representation of all Synthetical Principles
of the Understanding
That there should be principles at all is entirely due to the pure understanding, which is not only the faculty of rules in regard to all that happens, but itself the source
130 Trans ce7ide7it at A7ialytic of principles, according to which everything [p. 159] (that can become an object to us) is necessarily subject to rules, because, without such, phenomena would never become objects corresponding to knowledge. Even laws of nature, if they are considered as principles of the empirical use of the understanding, carry with them a character of necessity, and thus lead to the supposition that they rest on grounds which are valid a priori and before all experience. Nay, all laws of nature without distinction are subject to higher principles of the understanding, which they apply to particular cases of experience. They alone therefore supply the concept which contains the condition, and, as it were, the exponent of a rule in general, while experience furnishes each case to which the general rule applies.
There can hardly be any danger of our mistaking purely empirical principles for principles of the pure understanding or vice versa, for the character of necessity which distinguishes the concepts of the pure understanding, and the absence of which can easily be perceived in every empirical proposition, however general it may seem, will always prevent their confusion. There are, however, pure principles a priori which I should not like to ascribe to the pure understanding, because they are derived, not from pure concepts, but from pure intuitions (although by means of the understanding); the [p. 160] understanding being the faculty of the concepts. We find such principles in mathematics, but their application to experience, and therefore their objective validity, nay, even the possibility of such synthetical knowledge a priori (the deduction thereof) rests always on the pure understanding.
Transcendental Analytic 131
Hence my principles will not include the principles of mathematics, but they will include those on which the possibility and objective validity a priori of those mathematical principles are founded, and which consequently are to be looked upon as the source of those principles, proceeding from concepts to intuitions, and not from intuitions to concepts.
When the pure concepts of the understanding are applied to every possible experience, their synthesis is either tnathematical or dynamical^ for it is directed partly to the intuition of a phenomenon only, partly to its existence. The conditions a priori of intuition are absolutely necessary with regard to every possible experience, while the conditions of the existence of the object of a possible empirical intuition are in themselves accidental only. The principles of the mathematical use of the categories will therefore be absolutely necessary, that is apodictic, while those of their dynamical use, though likewise possessing the character of necessity a priori, can possess such a character subject only to the condition of empirical thought in experience, that is mediately and indirectly, and cannot therefore claim that immediate evidence which belongs to the former, although their certainty with regard to experience in general remains unaffected by this. Of this we shall be better qualified to judge at [p. 161] the conclusion of this system of principles.
Our table of categories gives us naturally the best instructions for drawing up a table of principles, because these are nothing but rules for the objective use of the former.
132 Transcendental Analytic
All principles of the pure understanding are therefore,
I Axioms of Intuition.
II
Ill
Anticipations of
Analogies of
Perception.
IV
Experience.
Postulates
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