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

of another, or at its mode of existence by means of the concepts of these things only. What else then remained ? There remained the possibility of experience, as that knowledge in which all objects must in the end be capable of being given to us, if their representation is to have any objective reality for us.

In this, namely in the synthetical unity of apperception of all phenomena, we discovered the conditions a priori of an absolute and necessary determination in time of all phenomenal existence. Without this even the empirical determinations in time would be impossible, and we thus established the rules of the synthetical unity a priori^ by which we might anticipate experience.

It was because people were ignorant of this method, and imagined that they could prove dogmatically synthetical propositions which the empirical use of the understanding follows as its principles, that so many and always unsuccessful attempts have been made to prove the proposition of the ' sufficient reason.

The other two analogies have not even been thought of, though everybody followed them unconsciously,^ because the method of the categories [p. 218] was wanting, by which alone every gap in the under-

^ The unity of the universe, in which all phenomena are supposed to be connected, is evidently a mere deduction of the quietly adopted principle of the communion of all substances as coexistent; for if they were isolated, they would not form parts of a whole, and if their connection (the reciprocity of the manifold) were not necessary for the sake of their coexistence, it would be impossible to use the latter, which is a purely ideal relation, as a proof of the former, which is real. We have shown, however, that communion is really the ground of the possibility of an empirical knowledge of coexistence, and that really we can only conclude from this the existence of the former, as its condition.

178 Transcendental Analytic standing, both with regard to concepts and principles, can be discovered and pointed out.

IV

The Postulates of Empirical Thought in General

1. What agrees with the formal conditions of experience (in intuition and in concepts) is possible

2. What is connected with the material conditions of experience (sensation) is real

3. That which, in its connection with the real, is determined by universal conditions of experience, is (exists as) necessary

Explanation [p. 219]

The categories of modality have this peculiar character that, as determining an object, they do not enlarge in the least the concept to which they are attached as predicates, but express only a relation to our faculty of knowledge. Even when the concept of a thing is quite complete, I can still ask with reference to that object, whether it is possible only, or real also, and, if the latter, whether it is necessary ? No new determinations of the object are thereby conceived, but it is only asked in what relation it (with all its determinations) stands to the understanding and its empirical employment, to the empirical faculty of judgment, and to reason, in its application to experience ?

The principles of modality are therefore nothing but explanations of the concepts of possibility, reality, and necessity, in their empirical employment, confining all categories to an empirical employment only, and prohibiting their transcendental^ use. For if these categories are

1 Here the same as transcendent.

Transcendental Analytic 179

not to have a purely logical character, expressing the forms of thought analytically, but are to refer to things, their possibility, reality, or necessity, they must have reference to possible experience and its synthetical unity, in which alone objects of knowledge can be given.