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, is. possible, that could prove, directly or indirectly, by any roundabout syllogisms, a complete absence of all reality in a phenomenon. We see therefore that experience can never supply a proof of empty space or empty time, because the total absence of reality in a sensuous intuition can itself never be perceived, neither can it be deduced from any phenomenon whatsoever and from the difference of degree in its reality ; nor ought it ever to be admitted in explanation of it. For although the total intuition of a certain space or time is real all through, no part of it being empty, yet as every reality has its degree which, while the extensive quality of the phenomenon remains un- [p. 173] changed, may diminish by infinite degrees down to the nothing or void, there must be infinitely differing degrees in which space and time are filled, and the intensive quantity in phenomena may be smaller or greater, although the extensive quantity as given in intuition remains the same.
We shall give an example. Almost all natural philosophers, perceiving partly by means of the momentum of gravity or weight, partly by means of the momentum of resistance against other matter in motion, that there is a great difference in the quantity of various kinds of matter though their volume is the same, conclude unanimously that this volume (the extensive quantity of phenomena) must in all of them, though in different degrees, contain a certain amount of empty space. Who could have thought that these mathematical and mechanical philosophers should have based such a conclusion on a purely metaphysical hypothesis, which they always profess to avoid, by assuming that the real
142 Transcendental Analytic in space (I do not wish here to call it impenetrability or weight, because these are empirical concepts) must always be the same, and can differ only by its extensive quantity, that is, by the number of parts. I meet this hypothesis, for which they could find no ground in experience, and which therefore is purely metaphysical, by a transcendental demonstration, which, though it is not intended to explain the difference in the [p. 174] filling of spaces, will nevertheless entirely remove the imagined necessity of their hypothesis which tries to explain that difference by the admission of empty spaces, and which thus restores, at least to the understanding, its liberty to explain to itself that difference in a different way, if any such hypothesis be wanted in natural philosophy.
We can easily perceive that although the same spaces are perfectly filled by two different kinds of matter, so that there is no point in either of them where matter is not present, yet the real in either, the quality being the same, has its own degrees (of resistance or weight) which, without any diminution of its extensive quantity, may grow smaller and smaller in infinitum, before it reaches the void and vanishes. Thus a certain expansion which fills a space, for instance, heat, and every other kind of phenomenal reality, may, without leaving the smallest part of space empty, diminish by degrees in infinitnm, and nevertheless fill space with its smaller, quite as much as another phenomenon with greater degrees. I do not mean to say that this is really the case with different kinds of matter according to their specific of gravity. I only want to show by a fundamental principle of the pure [p. 175] understanding, that the nature of our perceptions renders
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such an explanation possible, and that it is wrong to look upon the real in phenomena as equal in degree, and differing only in aggregation and its extensive quantity, nay to maintain this on the pretended authority of an a priori principle of the understanding.
Nevertheless, this anticipation of perception is apt to startle ^ an enquirer accustomed to and rendered cautious by transcendental disquisitions, and we may naturally wonder that the understanding should be able to anticipate ^ a synthetical proposition with regard to the degree of all that is real in phenomena, and, therefore, with regard to the possibility of an internal difference of sensation itself, apart from its empirical quality ; and it seems therefore a question well worthy of a solution, how the understanding can pronounce synthetically and a priori about phenomena, nay, anticipate them with regard to what, properly speaking, is empirical, namely, sensation.
The quality of sensation, colour, taste, etc., is always empirical, and cannot be conceived a priori. But the real that corresponds to sensations in general, as opposed to negation = o, does only represent something the concept of which implies being, and means nothing but the synthesis in any empirical consciousness. In the internal sense that empirical consciousness can be raised from o to [p. 176] any higher degree, so that an extensive quantity of intuition (for instance, an illuminated plain) excites the same
^ Kant wrote, etwas — etwas Aziffallendes^i the second etxvas being the adverb. Rosenkranz has left out one etwas, without necessity. It seems necessary, however, to add Uberlegung after transcendentaleii, as done by Erdmann.
2 Anticipiren k'onne must certainly be added, as suggested by Schopenhauer.
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