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

Transcendental Analytic 203

deprived of all the conditions of being used in judgments, that is, of the formal conditions of the subsumption of any possible object under these concepts. As therefore (as pure categories) they are not meant to be used empirically, and cannot be used transcendentally, they admit, if separated from sensibility, of no use at all ; that is, they cannot be applied to any possible object, and are nothing but the pure form of the use of the understanding with reference to objects in general, and of thought, without ever enabling us to think or determine any object by their means alone.

[Appearances,^ so far as they are thought as objects under the unity of the categories, are called phenomena. But if I admit things which are objects of the [p. 249] understanding only, and nevertheless can be given as objects of an intuition, though not of sensuous intuition (as coram intidtii mtellectuali\ such things would be called Noiimena (intelligibilia).

One might feel inclined to think that the concept of Phenomena^ as limited by the transcendental aesthetic, suggested by itself the objective reality of the Noiimena, and justified a division of objects into phenomena and noumena, and consequently of the world into a sensible and intelligible world {innndiLS sensibilis et intelligibilis) ; and this in such a way that the distinction between the^ two should not refer to the logical form only of a more or less clear knowledge of one and the same object, but to a difference in their original presentation to our knowledge, which makes them to differ in themselves from each other in kind. For if the senses only represent to us something

^ The passage from ' Appearances ' to ' given to me in intuition ' is left out in the Second Edition, and replaced by Supplement XXIV.

204 Transcendental Analytic as it appears, that something must by itself also be a thing, and an object of a non-sensuous intuition, i.e. of the understanding. That is, there must be a kind of knowledge in which there is no sensibility, and which alone possesses absolute objective reality, representing objects as they are, while through the empirical use of our understanding we know things only as they appear. Hence it would seem to follow that, beside the empirical [p. 250] use of the categories (limited by sensuous conditions), there was another one, pure and yet objectively valid, and that we could not say, as we have hitherto done, that our knowledge of the pure understanding contained nothing but principles for the exhibition of phenomena, which, even a priori, could not apply to anything but the formal possibility of experience. Here, in fact, quite a new field would seem to be open, a world, as it were, realised in thought (nay, according to some, even in intuition), which would be a more, and not a less, worthy object for the pure understanding.

All our representations are no doubt referred by the understanding to some sort of object, and as phenomena are nothing but representations, the understanding refers them to a something, as the object of our sensuous intuition, this something being however the transcendental object only. This means a something equal to x, of which we do not, nay, with the present constitution of our understanding, cannot know anything, but which ^ can only serve, as a correlatum of the unity of apperception, for the unity of the manifold in sensuous intuition, by means of which the understanding unites the manifold into the

^ Read welches instead of welcher.

Transcendental Analytic 205

concept of an object. This transcendental object cannot be separated from the sensuous data, because in that case nothing would remain by which it could be [p. 251] thought. It is not therefore an object of knowledge in itself, but only the representation of phenomena, under the concept of an object in general, which can be defined by the manifold of sensuous intuition.

For this very reason the categories do not represent a peculiar object, given to the understanding only, but serve only to define the transcendental object (the concept of something in general) by that which is given us through the senses, in order thus to know empirically phenomena under the concepts of objects.