Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason — trans. F. Max Müller
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themselves ; that is, in order to Hmit the objective vahdity of sensuous' knowledge (for all the rest to which sensuous intuition does not extend is called noumenon, for [p. 255] the very purpose of showing that sensuous knowledge cannot extend its domain over everything that can be thought by the understanding). But, after all, we cannot understand the possibility of such noumena, and whatever lies beyond the sphere of phenomena is (to us) empty ; that is, we have an understanding which problematically extends beyond that sphere, but no intuition, nay not even the conception of a possible intuition, by which, outside the field of sensibility, objects could be given to us, and our understanding could extend beyond that sensibility in its assertory use. The concept of a noumenon is therefore merely limitative^ and intended to keep the claims of sensibility within proper bounds, therefore of negative use only. But it is not a mere arbitrary fiction, but closely connected with the limitation of sensibility, though incapable of adding anything positive to the sphere of the senses.
A real division of objects into phenomena and noumena, and of the world into a sensible and intelligible world (in a positive sense), ^ is therefore quite inadmissible, although concepts may very well be divided into sensuous and intellectual. For no objects can be assigned to the intellectual concepts, nor can they be represented as objectively valid. If we drop the senses, how are we to make it [p. 256] conceivable that our categories (which would be the only remaining concepts for noumena) have any meaning at all, considering that, in order to refer them to any object, something more must be given than the mere unity of
^ Addition of the Second Edition.
Transcendental Analytic 209
thought, namely, a possible intuition, to which the categories could be applied ? With all this the concept of a noumenon, if taken as problematical only, remains not only admissible, but, as a concept to limit the sphere of sensibility, indispensable. In this case, however, it is not a particular intelligible object for oitr understanding, but an understanding to which it could belong is itself a problem, if we ask how it could know an object, not discursively by means of categories, but intuitively, and yet in a nonsensuous intuition, — a process of which we could not understand even the bare possibility. Our understanding thus acquires a kind of negative extension, that is, it does not become itself limited by sensibility, but, on the contrary, limits it, by calling things by themselves (not considered as phenomena) noumena. In doing this, it immediately proceeds to prescribe limits to itself, by admitting that it cannot know these noumena by means of the categories, but can only think of them under the name of something unknown.
In the writings of modern philosophers, however, I meet with a totally different use of the terms of mtmdus sensibilis and intelligibilis} totally different from the meaning assigned to these terms by the ancients, [p. 257] Here all difficulty seems to disappear. But the fact is, that there remains nothing but mere word-mongery. In accordance with this, some people have been pleased to call the whole of phenomena, so far as they are seen, the world of sense ; but so far as their connection, according to general laws of the understanding, is taken into account, the world of the understanding. Theoretical astronomy,
^ An additional note in the Second Edition is given in Supplement XXV. P
210 Transcendental Analytic which only teaches the actual observation of the starryheavens, would represent the former; contemplative astronomy, on the contrary (taught according to the Copernican system, or, it may be, according to Newton's laws of gravitation), the latter, namely, a purely intelligible world. But this twisting of words is a mere sophistical excuse, in order to avoid a troublesome question, by changing its meaning according to one's own convenience. Understanding and reason may be applied to phenomena, but it is very questionable whether they can be applied at all to an object which is not a phenomenon, but a noumenon ; and it is this, when the object is represented as purely intelligible, that is, as given to the understanding only, and not to the senses. The question therefore is whether, besides the empirical use of the understanding (even in the Newtonian view of the world), a transcendental use is possible, referring to the noumenon, as its object; and that question we have answered decidedly in the negative.
When we therefore say that the senses rep- [p. 258] resent objects to us as they appear, and the understanding as they are, the latter is not to be taken in a transcendental, but in a purely empirical meaning, namely, as to how they, as objects of experience, must be represented, according to the regular connection of phenomena, and not according to what they may be, as objects of the pure understanding, apart from their relation to possible experience, and therefore to our senses. This will always remain unknown to us ; nay, we shall never know whether such a transcendental and exceptional knowledge is possible at all, at least as comprehended under our ordinary categories. With us understanding and sensibility cannot
Transcendental Analytic 211
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