Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason — trans. F. Max Müller
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which thus vainly, but always with the same confidence, is searching for buried treasures. It is our duty at present to acquire an accurate knowledge of the transcendental use of the pure reason, its principles and ideas, in order to be able to determine and estimate correctly their influence and value.
But before I leave this preliminary introduction, I beg those who really care for philosophy (which means more than is commonly supposed), if they are convinced by what I have said and shall still have to say, to take the term idea, in its original meaning, under their special protection, so that it should no longer be lost among other expressions, by which all sorts of representations are loosely designated, to the great detriment of philosophy.
There is no lack of names adequate to express every kind of representation, without our having to encroach on the property of others. I shall [p. 320] give a graduated list of them. The whole class may be called representation {repraesentatio) . Under it stands conscious representation, perception {perceptio).
A perception referring to the subject only, as a modification of his state, is sensation {sensatio), while an objective sensation is called knowledge, cognition (cognitid). Cognition is either intuition or concept (intuitus vel co^iceptus). The former refers immediately to an object and is singular, the latter refers to it mediately, that is, by means of a characteristic mark that can be shared by several things in common.
A concept is either empirical or pure, and the pure concept, so far as it has its origin in the understanding only (not in the pure image of sensibility) is called notion inotio). A concept formed of notions and transcending all possible experience is an idea, or a concept of reason. To any one who has once accustomed himself to these distinctions, it
Transcendejital Dialectic 261
must be extremely irksome to hear the representation of red colour called an idea, though it could not even be rightly called a notion (a concept of the understanding).
TRANSCENDENTAL DIALECTIC
[p- 321]
BOOK I
Second Section
Of Transcendental Ideas
We had an instance in our transcendental Analytrc, how the mere_logical form of our knowledge could contain the origin of pure concepts a priori^ which represent objects antecedently to all experience, or rather indicate a synthetical unity by which alone an empirical knowledge of objects becomes possible. The form of judgments (changed into a concept of the synthesis of intuitions) gave us the categories that guide and determine the use of the understanding in every experience. We may expect, therefore, that the form of the -syllogisms, if referred to the syntheticaLuDity of intuitionS;, according to the manner of the categories, will contain the origin of certain concepts « /r2/?r?', to be called con cepts-of: pure reason, or transcendental ideas, which ought to determine the use of the understanding within the whole realm pi experience, according to principles.
The function of reason in its syllogisms consists in the universality of cognition, according to concepts, and the syllogism itself is in reality a judgment, deter- [p. 322] mined ^ /n^r/ in the whole extent of its condition. The
262 T^'anscendental Dialectic proposition * Caius is mortal,' might be taken from experience, by means of the understanding only. But what we want is a concept, containing the condition under which the predicate (assertion in general) of that judgment is given (here the concept of man), and after I have arranged it under this condition, taken in its whole extent (all men are mortal), I proceed to determine accordingly the knowledge of my object (Caius is mortal).
What we are doing therefore in the conclusion of a syllogism is to restrict the predicate to a certain object, after we have used it first in the major, in its whole extent, under ascertain condition. THTs" completeness of its extent, in reference to such a condition, is called univexsality {universalitas) ; and to this corresponds, in the synthesis^ of intuitions, the totality (universitas) of_.coii.d it i on s . The transcendental concept of reason is, therefore, nothing Sut the "concept ~ioF the totality of the conditions of anything given as conditioned. As therefore the unconditioned alone renders a totality of conditions possible, and as conversely the totality of conditions must always be unconditioned, it follows that a pure concept of reason in general may be explained as a concept of the unconditioned, so far as it contains a basis for the synthesis of the conditioned.
As many kinds of relations as there are, which [p. 323] the understanding represents to itself by means of the categories, so many pure concepts of the reason we shall find, that is, first, the unconditioned of the categorical synthesis in a subject ; secondly, the unconditioned of the hypothetical synthesis of the members of a series ; thirdly, the unconditioned of the disjunctive synthesis of the parts of a system.
Trmiscendental Dialectic 263
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