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

Transcendental Analytic 171

and might thus imagine that the question how it was possible is unnecessary. For there are so many unfounded pretensions to enlarge our knowledge by pure reason that we must accept it as a general principle, to be always distrustful, and never to believe or accept any- [p. 210] thing of this kind without documents capable of a thorough deduction, however clear the dogmatical proof of it may appear.

All addition to our empirical knowledge and every advance in perception is nothing but an enlargement of the determinations of our internal sense, that is, a progression in time, whatever the objects may be, whether phenomena or pure intuitions. This progression in time determines everything, and is itself determined by nothing else, that is, the parts of that progression are only given in time, and through the synthesis of time, but not time before this synthesis. For this reason every transition in our perception to something that follows in time is really a determination of time through the production of that perception, and as time is always and in all its parts a quantity, the production of a perception as a quantity, through all degrees (none of them being the smallest), from zero up to its determined degree. This shows how it is possible to know a priori a law of changes, as far as their form is concerned. We are only anticipating our own apprehension, the formal condition of which, as it dwells in us before all given phenomena, may well be known a priori.

In the same manner therefore in which time contains the sensuous condition a priori of the possi- [p. 211] bility of a continuous progression of that which exists to that which follows, the understanding, by means of the unity of apperception, is a condition a priori of the possi1/2 T^'anscendental Analytic bility of a continuous determination of the position of all phenomena in that time, and this through a series of causes and effects, the former producing inevitably the existence of the latter, and thus rendering the empirical knowledge of the relations of time valid for all times (universally) and therefore objectively valid.

[Third Analogy

Principle of Commnnity

All substances, in so far as they are coexistent, stand in complete community, that is, reciprocity one to another i]

Proof

Things are coexistent in so far as they exist at one and the same time. But how can we know that they exist at one and the same time ? Only if the order in the synthesis of apprehension of the manifold is indifferent, that is, if I may advance from A through B, C, D, to E, or contrariwise from E to A. For, if the synthesis were successive in time (in the order beginning with A and ending with E), it would be impossible to begin the apprehension with the perception of E and to go backwards to A, because A belongs to past time, and can no longer be an object of apprehension. [p. 212]

If we supposed it possible that in a number of substances, as phenomena, each were perfectly isolated, so that none influenced another or received influences from

1 See Supplement XX.

Transcendental Analytic 173

another, then the coexistence of them could never become an object of possible perception, nor could the existence of the one through any process of empirical synthesis lead us on to the existence of another. For if we imagined that they were separated by a perfectly empty space, a perception, proceeding from the one in time to the other might no doubt determine the existence of it by means of a subsequent perception, but would never be able to determine whether that phenomenon followed objectively on the other or was coexistent with it.

There must therefore be something besides their mere existence by which A determines its place in time for B^ and B for A^ because thus only can these two substances be represented empirically as coexistent. Nothing, however, can determine the place of anything else in time, except that which is its cause or the cause of its determinations. Therefore every substance (since it can be effect with regard to its determinations only) must contain in itself the causality of certain determinations in another substance, and, at the same time, the effects of the causality of that other substance, that is, substances must stand in dynamical communion, immediately or medi- [p. 213] ately, with each other, if their coexistence is to be known in any possible experience. Now, everything without which the experience of any objects would be impossible, may be said to be necessary with reference to such objects of experience ; from which it follows that it is necessary for all substances, so far as they are coexistent as phenomena, to stand in a complete communion of reciprocity with each other.

The word communion (Gemeinschaft) may be used in two senses, meaning either communio or comme^xium.

1^4 Tj'anscendental Analytic