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

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and expert reader will find it easy to do this himself, and to discover the proper method for it. They all simply agree in this, that they admit nothing in our empirical synthesis that would in any way run counter to the understanding, and to the continuous cohesion of all phenomena, that is, to the unity of its concepts. For it is the understand- [p. 230] ing alone through which the unity of experience, in which all perceptions must have their place, becomes possible.

Whether the field of possibility be larger than the field which contains everything which is real, and whether this again be larger than the field of what is necessary, are curious questions and admitting of a synthetical solution, which questions however are to be brought before the tribunal of reason only. They really come to this, whether all things, as phenomena, belong to the sphere of one experience, of which every given perception forms a part, that could not be connected with any other phenomena, or whether my perceptions can ever belong to more than one possible experience (in its general connection). The understanding in reality does nothing but give to experience a rule a priori^ according to the subjective and formal conditions of sensibility and apperception, which alone render experience possible. Other forms of intuition (different from space and time), and other forms of the understanding (different from the discursive forms of thought or conceptual knowledge), even if they were possible, we could in no wise render conceivable or intelligible to ourselves ; and even if we could, they would never belong to experience, the only field of knowledge in which objects are given to us. Whether there be [p. 231] therefore other perceptions but those that belong to our whole possible experience, whether there be in fact a

1 88 Transcendental Analytic completely new field of matter, can never be determined by the understanding, which is only concerned with the synthesis of what is given.

The poverty of the usual arguments by which we construct a large empire of possibility of which all that is real (the objects of experience) forms but a small segment, is but too apparent. When we say that all that is real is possible, we arrive, according to the logical rules of inversion, at the merely particular proposition that some possible is real, and thus seem to imply that much is possible that is not real. Nay, it seems as if we might extend the number of things possible beyond that of things real, simply on the ground that something must be added to the possible to make it real. But this addition to the possible I cannot recognise, because what would thus be added to the possible, would be really the impossible. It is only to my understanding that anything can be added concerning the agreement with the formal conditions of experience, and what can be added is the connection with some perception ; and whatever is connected with such a perception, according to empirical laws, is real, though it may not be perceived immediately. But that, in constant connection with what is given us in experience, [p. 232] there should be another series of phenomena, and therefore more than one all-embracing experience, cannot possibly be concluded from what is given us, and still less, if nothing is given us, because nothing can be thought without some kind of material. What is possible only under conditions which themselves are possible only, is not possible in the full sense of the word, not therefore in the sense in which we ask whether the possibility of things can extend beyond the limits of experience.

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