Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason — trans. F. Max Müller
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The translator’s English as printed (F. Max Müller). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.
When we reflect logically only, we only compare in our understanding co;icepts among themselves, trying to find out whether both have exactly the same contents, whether they contradict themselves or not, whether something belongs to a concept, or is added to it, and which of the two may be given, while the other may be a mode only of thinking the given concept. But if I refer these concepts to an object in general (in a transcendental sense), without determining whether it be an object of sensuous or intellectual intuition, certain limitations appear at once, warning us not to go beyond the concept, and upsetting all empirical use of it, thus proving that a representation of an object, as of a thing in general, is not only insufficient, but, if without sensuous determination, and independent of empirical conditions, self-contradictory. It is necessary therefore either to take no account at all of the
228 Transce7idental Analytic object (as we do in logic) or, if not, then to think it under the conditions of sensuous intuition, because the intelHgible would require a quite peculiar intuition which we do not possess, and, without it, would be nothing to us, while on the other side phenomena also could never [p. 280] be things by themselves. For if I represent to myself things in general only, the difference of external relations cannot, it is true, constitute a difference of the things themselves, but rather presupposes it ; and, if the concept of one thing does not differ at all internally from that of another, I only have one and the same thing placed in different relations. Furthermore, by adding a mere affirmation (reality) to another, the positive in it is indeed augmented, and nothing is taken away^ or removed, so that we see that the real in things can never be in contradiction with itself, etc.
A certain misunderstanding of these reflective concepts has, as we showed, exercised so great an influence on the use of the understanding, as to mislead even one of the most acute philosophers to the adoption of a so-called system of intellectual knowledge, which undertakes to determine objects without the intervention of the senses. For this reason the exposition of the cause of the misunderstanding, which lies in the amphiboly of these concepts, as the origin of false principles, is of great utility in determining and securing the true limits of the understanding.
It is no doubt true, that what can be affirmed or denied of a concept in general, can also be affirmed or denied of any part of it {dictimi de omni et nidld) ; but it [p. 281] would be wrong so to change this logical proposition as to make it say that whatever is not contained in a general
Transcendental Analytic 229
concept, is not contained either in the particular concepts comprehended under it ; for these are particular concepts for the very reason that they contain more than is conceived in the general concept. Nevertheless the whole intellectual system of Leibniz is built up on this fallacy, and with it falls necessarily to the ground, together with all equivocation in the use of the understanding, that had its origin in it.
Leibniz's principle of discernibility is really based on the supposition that, if a certain distinction is not to be found in the general concept of a thing, it could not be met with either in the things themselves, and that therefore all things were perfectly the same {numero eadem), which are not distinguished from each other in their concept also, as to quality or quantity. And because in the mere concept of a thing, no account has been taken of many a necessary condition of its intuition, it has rashly been concluded that that which, in forming an abstraction, has been intentionally left out of account, did really not exist anywhere, and nothing has been allowed to a thing except what is contained in its concept. [p. 282]
The concept of a cubic foot of space, wherever and how many times soever I may think it, is in itself perfectly the same. But two cubic feet are nevertheless distinguished in space, by their places alone {numero diversa), and these places are conditions of the intuition in which the object of our concept is given, and which, though they do not belong to the concept, belong nevertheless to the whole of sensibility. In a similar manner there is no contradiction in the concept of a thing, unless something negative has been connected with something affirmative ; and simply affirmative concepts, if joined together, cannot
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