Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason — trans. F. Max Müller
The text is shown on its own: no facing layer is held for this issue.
The translator’s English as printed (F. Max Müller). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.
1 Sensibility, if subjected to the understanding as the object on which it exercises its function, is the source of real knowledge, but sensibility, if it influences the action of the understanding itself and leads it on to a judgment, is the cause of error.
240 Transcendental Dialectic by transcendental reflection, whereby, as we tried to show, the right place is assigned to each representation in the faculty of knowledge corresponding to it, and the influence of either faculty upon such representation is determined. f\\, is not at present our business to treat of empirical, for instance, optical appearance or illusion, which occurs in the empirical use of the otherwise correct rules of the ; understanding, and by which, owing to the influence of I imagination, the faculty of judgment is misled.
We ; have to deal here with nothing but the transcendental ^\ illusion, which touches principles never even intended to be applied to experience, which might give us a test of their correctness, — an illusion which, in spite of all I the warnings of criticism, tempts us far beyond the empirical use of the categories, and deludes us with the mere dream of an extension of the pure understanding.
All 1\ principles the application of which is entirely confined Vwithin the limits of possible experience,/we [p. 296] shall call immanent ; those, on the contrary, which tend to transgress those limits, transcendent.
I do not mean by this the transcendental use or abuse of the categories, which is a mere fault of the faculty of the judgment, not being as yet sufficiently subdued by criticism nor sufficiently attentive to the limits of the sphere within which alone the pure understanding has full play, but real principles which call upon us to break down all those barriers, and to claim a perfectly new territory, which nowhere recognises any demarcation at all.
Here transcendental and transcendent do not mean the same thing. The principles of the pure understanding, which we explained before, are meant to be only of empirical, and not of transcendental application, that is, they cannot
Transcendental Dialectic 241
transcend the limits of experience. A principle, on the contrary, which removes these landmarks, nay, insists on our transcending them, is called transcendent. If our critique succeeds in laying bare the illusion of those pretended principles, the other principles of a purely empirical use may, in opposition to the former, be called immanent.
Logical illusion, which consists in a mere imitation of the forms of reason (the illusion of sophistic syllogisms), arises entirely from want of attention to logical rules. It disappears at once, when our attention [-P.-297] is roused. Transcendental illusion, on the contrary, does not disappear, although it has been shown up, and its worthlessn^ss rendered clear by means of transcendental
<^*t ...
criticisn^as, for instance, the illusion inherent in the proposition that the world must have a beginning in time. The cause of this is that there exists in our reason (considered subjectively as a faculty of human knowledge) principles and maxims of its use, which have the appearance of objective principles, and lead us to mistake the subjective necessity of a certain connection of our concepts in favour of the understanding for an objective necessity in the determination of things by fthemselves,/This illusion is as impossible to avoid as flit is to prevent the sea from appearing to us higher at I a distance than on the shore, because we see it by / higher rays of light ; or to prevent the moon from appearing, even to an astronomer, larger at its rising, \ although he is not deceived by that illusion^ /^Transcendental Dialectic must, therefore, be content to lay bare the illusion of transcendental judgments and guarding against its deceptions — but it will never sue242 Transcendental Dialectic
No commentary for this page under the selected tracks.
There is commentary on page 1.