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

determine objects, unless they are joined together. If we separate them, we have intuitions without concepts, or concepts without intuitions, in both cases representations which we cannot refer to any definite object.

If, after all these arguments, anybody should still hesitate to abandon the purely transcendental use of the categories, let him try an experiment with them for framing any synthetical proposition. An analytical proposition does not in the least advance the understanding, which, as in such a proposition it is only concerned with what is already thought in the concept, does not ask whether the concept in itself has any reference to objects, or expresses only the unity of thought in general [p. 259] (this completely ignoring the manner in which an object may be given). The understanding in fact is satisfied if it knows what it contained in the concept of an object ; it is indifferent as to the object to which the concept may refer. But let him try the experiment with any synthetical and so-called transcendental proposition, as for instance, * Everything that exists, exists as a substance, or as a determination inherent in it,' or * Everything contingent exists as an effect of some other thing, namely, its cause,' etc. Now I ask, whence can the understanding take these synthetical propositions, as the concepts are to apply, not to some possible experience, but to things by themselves (noumena) } Where is that third term to be found which is always required for a synthetical proposition, in order thus to join concepts which have no logical (analytical) relation with each other.-* It will be impossible to prove such a proposition, nay even to justify the possibility of any such pure assertion, without appealing to the empirical use of the understanding.

212 Transcendental Analytic and thus renouncing entirely the so-called pure and nonsensuous judgment. There are no principles therefore according to which the concepts of pure and merely i.itelligible objects could ever be applied, because we cannot imagine any way in which they could be given, and the problematic thought, which leaves a place open to them, serves only, like empty space, to limit the sphere of empirical principles, without containing or indicat- [p. 260] ing any other object of knowledge, lying beyond that sphere.

APPENDIX

Of the Amphiboly of Reflective Concepts, owing to THE Confusion of the Empirical with the Transcendental Use of the Understanding

Reflection {reflexio) is not concerned with objects themselves, in order to obtain directly concepts of them, but is a state of the mind in which we set ourselves to discover the subjective conditions under which we may arrive at concepts. It is the consciousness of the relation of given representations to the various sources of our knowledge by which alone their mutual relation can be rightly determined. Before saying any more of our representations, the first question is, to which faculty of knowledge they may all belong ; whether it is the understanding or the senses by which they are connected and compared. Many a judgment is accepted from mere habit, or made from inclination, and as no reflection precedes or even follows it critically, the judgment is supposed [p. 261] to have had its origin in the understanding. It is not all judgments that require an investigation, that is, aj

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careful attention with regard to the grounds of their truth ; for if they are immediately certain, as for instance, that between two points there can be only one straight line, no more immediately certain marks of their truth than that which they themselves convey could be discovered. But all judgments, nay, all comparisons, require reflection, that is, a discrimination of the respective faculty of knowledge to which any given concepts belong. The act by which I place in general the comparison of representations by the side of the faculty of knowledge to which that comparison belongs, and by which I determine whether these representations are compared with each other as belonging to the pure understanding or to sensuous intuition, I call transcendental reflection. The relation in which the two concepts may stand to each other in one state of the mind is that of identity and difference, of agreement and opposition, of the internal and external, and finally of the determinable and the determination (matter and form). The right determination of that relation depends on the question in which faculty of knowledge they subjectively belong to each other, whether in sensibility or in the understanding. For the proper distinction of the latter is of great importance with regard to the manner in which the former must be considered. [p. 262]

Before proceeding to form any objective judgments, we have to compare the concepts with regard to the identity (of many representations under one concept) as the foundation of general judgments, or with regard to their difference as the foundation of particular judgments, or with regard to their agreement and opposition serving as the foundations of affirmative and negative judgments, etc.

214 Transcendental Analytic