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.
mediate perception of that matter impossible. According to the laws of sensibility and the texture of our perceptions, we ought in our experience to arrive at an immediate empirical intuition of that magnetic matter, if only our senses were more acute, for their actual obtuseness does not concern the form of possible experience. Wherever, therefore, perception and its train can reach, according to empirical laws, there our knowledge also of the existence of things can reach. But if we do not begin with experience, or do not proceed according to the laws of the empirical connection of phenomena, we are only making a vain display, as if we could guess and discover the existence of anything.^
With reference to the third postulate we find that it refers to the material necessity in existence, and not to the merely formal and logical necessity in the connection of concepts. As it is impossible that the existence of the objects of the senses should ever be known entirely a priori^ though it may be known to a certain extent a priori^ namely, with reference to another already given existence, and as even in that case we can only [p. 227] arrive at such an existence as must somewhere be contained in the whole of the experience of which the given perception forms a part, it follows that the necessity of existence can never be known from concepts, but always from the connection only with what is actually perceived, according to general rules of experience.^ Now, there is no existence that can be known as necessary under the condition of other given phenomena, except the existence
1 See Supplement XXI.
2 Insert man before gleichwohl, and leave out konnen at the end of the sentence.
Transccndejital Analytic 185
of effects from given causes, according to the laws of causality. It is not therefore the existence of things (substances), but the existence of their state, of which alone we can know the necessity, and this from other states only, which are given in perception, and according to the empirical laws of causality. Hence it follows that the criterium of necessity can only be found in the law of possible experience, viz. that everything that happens is determined a p7'iori by its cause in phenomena. ^ We therefore know in nature the necessity of those effects only of which the causes are given, and the character of necessity in existence never goes beyond the field of possible experience, and even there it does not apply to the existence of things, as substances, because such substances can never be looked upon as empirical effects or as something that happens and arises. Necessity, therefore, affects only the relations of phenomena [p. 228] according to the dynamical law of causality, and the possibility, dependent upon it, of concluding a priori from a given existence (of a cause) to another existence (that of an effect). Thus the principle that everything which happens is hypothetically necessary, subjects all the changes in the world to a law, that is, to a rule of necessary existence, without which there would not. even be such a thing as nature. Hence the proposition that nothing happens by blind chance ijn mtmdo non daticr casus) is an a priori la\^ of nature, and so is likewise the other, that no necessity in nature is a blind, but always a conditional and therefore an intelligible, necessity {non datur fatiim). Both these are laws by which the mere play of changes is ren1 Read seine Ursache instead of ihre\
1 86 Transcendental Analytic dered subject to a nature of things (as phenomena), or, what is the same, to that unity of the understanding in which alone they can belong to experience, as the synthetical unity of phenomena. Both are dynamical principles. The former is in reality a consequence of the principle of causality (the second of the analogies of experience).
The latter is one of the principles of modality, which to the determination of causality adds the concept of necessity, which itself is subject to a rule of the understanding. The principle of continuity rendered every break in the series of phenomena (changes) impossible {in miindo non datnr saltus), and likewise any gap between two [p. 229] phenomena in the whole of our empirical intuitions in space {fion datnr hiatns).
For so we may express the proposition that nothing can enter into experience to prove a vacuum, or even to admit it as a possible part of empirical synthesis. For the vacuum, which one may conceive as outside the field of possible experience (the world), can never come before the tribunal of the understanding which has to decide on such questions only as concern the use to be made of given phenomena for empirical knowledge.
It is in reality a problem of that ideal reason which goes beyond the sphere of a possible experience, and wants to forn; an opinion of that which surrounds and limits experience, and will therefore have to be considered in our transcendental Dialectic.
With regard to the four propositions {in mtindo non datnr hiatus, non datus saltus, non datnr casus, non datnr fat inn), it would be easy to represent each of them, as well as all principles of a transcendental origin, according to the order of the categories, and thus to assign its proper place to every one of them. But; after what has been said before, the versed
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