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.
The postulate of the possibility of things [p. 220] demands that the concept of these should agree with the formal conditions of experience in general. This, the objective form of experience in general, contains all synthesis which is required for a knowledge of objects. A concept is to be considered as empty, and as referring to no object, if the synthesis which it contains does not belong to experience, whether as borrowed from it (in which case it is called an empirical concept), or as a synthesis on which, as a condition a priori^ all experience (in its form) depends, in which case it is a pure concept, but yet belonging to experience, because its object can only be found in it. For whence could the character of the possibility of an object, which can be conceived by a synthetical concept a priori^ be derived, except from the synthesis which constitutes the form of all empirical knowledge of objects.-' It is no doubt a necessary logical condition, that such a concept must contain nothing contradictory, but this is by no means sufficient to establish the objective reality of a concept, that is, the possibility of such an object, as is conceived by a concept. Thus in the concept of a figure to be enclosed between two straight lines, there is nothing contradictory, because the concepts of two straight lines and their meeting contain no negation of a fig- [p. 221] ure. The impossibility depends, not on the concept itself, but on its construction in space, that is, the conditions of space and its determinations, and it is these that have obi8o Transcendental Analytic jective reality, or apply to possible things, because they contain a priori in themselves the form of experience in general.
And now we shall try to explain the manifold usefulness and influence of this postulate of possibility. If I represent to myself a thing that is permanent, while everything which changes belongs merely to its state, I can never know from such a concept by itself that a thing of that kind is possible. Or, if I represent to myself something so constituted that, when it is given, something else must at all times and inevitably follow upon it, this may no doubt be conceived without contradiction, but we have as yet no means of judging whether such a quality, viz. causality, is to be met with in any possible object. Lastly, I can very well represent to myself different things (substances) so constituted, that the state of the one produces an effect on the state of the other, and this reciprocally; but whether such a relation can belong to any things cannot be learned from these concepts which contain a purely arbitrary synthesis. The objective reality of these concepts is only known when we see that they [p. 222] express a priori the relations of perceptions in every kind of experience; and this objective reality, that is, their transcendental truth, though independent of all experience, is nevertheless not independent of all relation to the form of experience in general, and to that synthetical unity in which alone objects can be known empirically.
But if we should think of framing new concepts of substances, forces, and reciprocal actions out of the material supplied to us by our perceptions, without borrowing from experience the instance of their connection, we should entangle ourselves in mere cobwebs of our brain, the possiTranscende7ttal Analytic iSi bility of which could not be tested by any criteria, because in forming them we were not guided by experience, nor had borrowed these concepts from it.
Such purely imaginary concepts cannot receive the character of possibility, like the categories a priori^ as conditions on which all experience depends, but only a posteriori, as concepts that must be given by experience, so that their possibility can either not be known at all, or a posteriori, and empirically only.
Thus, for instance, a substance supposed to be present as permanent in space, and yet not filling it (like that something between matter and the thinking subject, which some have tried to introduce), or a peculiar faculty of our mind, by which we can see (not only infer) the future, or lastly, another faculty, by which we can enter into a community of thought with other men (however distant they may be), all these are concepts the [p. 223] possibility of which has nothing to rest on, because it is not founded on experience and its known laws.
Without these they are and can only be arbitrary combinations of thought which, though they contain nothing contradictory in themselves, have no claim to objective reality, or to the possibility of such an object as is to be conceived by them.
With regard to reality, it stands to reason that we cannot conceive it in the concrete without the aid of experience ; for reality concerns sensation only, as the material of experience, and not the form of relations, which might to a certain extent allow us to indulge in mere fancies.
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