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

General mechanics can even give us the empirical condition of that opposition in an a priori rule, by attending to the opposition of directions ; a condition of which the transcendental concept of reality knows nothing. Although Leibniz himself did not announce this proposition with all the pomp of a new principle, he yet made use of it for new assertions, and his followers expressly inserted it in their system of the Leibniz-Wolfian philosophy.

According to this principle all evils, for example, are nothing but the consequences of the limitations of created beings, that is, they are negations, because these can be the only opposites of reality (which is perfectly true in the mere concept of the thing in general, but not in things as phenomena).

In like manner the followers of Leibniz consider it not only possible, but even natural, to unite all reality, without fearing any opposition, in one being ; because the only opposition they know is that [p. 274] of contradiction (by which the concept of a thing itself is annihilated), while they ignore that of reciprocal action and reaction, when one real cause destroys the effect of another, a process which we can only represent to ourselves when the conditions are given in sensibility.

Thirdly. The Leibnizian monadology has really no other foundation than that Leibniz represented the difference of the internal and the external in relation to the understanding only. Substances must have something internal, which is free from all external relations, and therefore from composition also. The simple, therefore, or uncompounded, is the foundation of the internal of things by themselves. This internal in the state of substances cannot consist in space, form, contact, or motion (all these determinations being external relations), and we cannot therefore ascribe

224 Transcendental Analytic to substances any other internal state but that which belongs to our own internal sense, namely, the state of representations. This is the history of the monads, which were to form the elements of the whole universe, and the energy of which consists in representations only, so that properly they can be active within themselves only.

For this reason, his principle of a possible community of substances could only be a pre-established harmony, and not a physical influence. For, as every- [p. 275] thing is actively occupied internally only, that is, with its own representations, the state of representations in one substance could not be in active connection with that of another; but it became necessary to admit a third cause, exercising its influence on all substances, and making their states to correspond with each other, not indeed by occasional assistance rendered in each particular case {systema assistentiae), but through the unity of the idea of a cause valid for all, and in which all together must receive their existence and permanence, and therefore also their reciprocal correspondence according to universal laws.

Fourthly. Leibniz's celebrated doctrine of space and time, in which he intellectualised these forms of sensibility, arose entirely from the same delusion of transcendental reflection. If by means of the pure understanding alone I want to represent the external relations of things, I can do this only by means of the concept of their reciprocal action ; and if I want to connect one state with another state of the same thing, this is possible only in the order of cause and effect. Thus it happened that Leibniz conceived space as a certain order in the community of substances, and time as the dynamical sequence of their states. That which space and time seem to posTranscendental Analytic 225 sess as proper to themselves and independent [p. 276] of things, he ascribed to the confusion of these concepts, which made us mistake what is a mere form of dynamical relations for a peculiar and independent intuition, antecedent to things themselves. Thus space and time became with him the intelligible form of the connection of things (substances and their states) by themselves, and things were intelligible substances {siibstantiae noumena). Nevertheless he tried to make these concepts valid for phenomena, because he would not concede to sensibility any independent kind of intuition, but ascribed all, even the empirical representation of objects, to the understanding, leaving to the senses nothing but the contemptible work of confusing and mutilating the representations of the understanding.