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

The principles resulting from this highest principle of pure reason will however be transcendent, with regard to all phenomena ; that is to say, it will be impossible ever to make any adequate empirical use of such a principle. It will thus be completely different from all principles of the understanding, the use of which is entirely immanent and directed to the possibility of experience only. The task that is now before us in the transcendental Dialectic which has to be developed from sources deeply hidden in the human reason, is this : to discover the correctness or otherwise the falsehood of the principle that the series of conditions (in the synthesis of phenomena, or of objective thought in general) extends to the unconditioned, and what consequences result therefrom with regard to the empirical use of the understanding: — to find [p. 309] out whether there is really such an objectively valid principle of reason, and not only, in place of it, a logical rule which requires us, by ascending to ever higher conditions, to approach their completeness, and thus to bring the highest unity of reason, whicli is possible to us, into our

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knowledge : to find out, I say, whether, by some misconception, a mere tendency of reason has not been mistaken for a transcendental principle of pure reason, postulating, without sufficient reflection, absolute completeness in the series of conditions in the objects themselves, and what kind of misconceptions and illusions may in that case have crept into the syllogisms of reason, the major proposition of which has been taken over from pure reason (being perhaps a petitio rather than a postulatum)^ and which ascend from experience to its conditions. We shall divide it into two parts, of which the first will treat of the transcendent concepts of pure reason, the second of transcendent and dialectical syllogisms.

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BOOK I

OF THE CONCEPTS OF PURE REASON

Whatever may be thought of the possibility of concepts of pure reason, it is certain that they are not simply obtained by reflection, but by inference. Concepts of the understanding exist a priori^ before experience, and for the sake of it, but they contain nothing but the unity of reflection applied to phenomena, so far as they are necessarily intended for a possible empirical consciousness. It is through them alone that knowledge and determination of an object become possible. They are the first to give material for conclusions, and they are not preceded by any concepts a priori of objects from which they could themselves be deduced. Their objective reality however depends on this, that because they constitute the intellectual form of all experience, it is necessary that their application should always admit of being exhibited in experience.

The very name, however, of a cojicept of reason gives a kind of intimation that it is not intended to be limited to experience, because it refers to a kind of knowledge of which every empirical knowledge is a part only (it may be,

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the whole of possible experience or of its empir- [p. 311] ical synthesis) : and to which all real experience belongs, though it can never fully attain to it. Concepts of reason serve for conceiving or comprehending ; concepts of the understanding for understanding (perceptions). If they contain the unconditioned, they refer to something to which all experience may belong, but which itself can never become an object of experience; — something to which reason in its conclusions from experience leads up, and by which it estimates and measures the degree of its own empirical use, but which never forms part of empirical synthesis. If such concepts possess, notwithstanding, objective validity, they may be called conceptiis ratiocinati (concepts legitimately formed) ; if they have only been surreptitiously obtained, by a kind of illusory conclusion, they may be called conceptus ratiocinantes (sophistical concepts). But as this, subject can only be fully treated in the chapter on the dialectical conclusions of pure reason, we shall say no more of it now, but shall only, as we gave the name of categories to the pure concepts of the understanding, give a new name to the concepts of pure reason, and call them transcendental ideaSy a name that has now to be explained and justified. [p. 312]

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BOOK I

First Section

Of Ideas in General