Ninth Section. On the empirical use of the regulative principle of reason, in respect of all cosmological ideas.

Since, as we have shown on several occasions, there is no transcendental use, neither of the understanding's pure concepts nor of reason's concepts; since the absolute totality of the series of the conditions in the sensible world rests solely upon a transcendental use of reason, which requires this unconditioned completeness of what it presupposes as a thing in itself, yet the sensible world contains no such thing: the discussion can accordingly no longer concern the absolute magnitude of the series within it, whether these be limited or in themselves unlimited, but only how far, in the empirical regress, we are to trace experience back to its conditions, so that we come to rest, as reason's rule prescribes, at no answer to its questions save the one befitting the object.

Thus what remains to us alone is the validity of reason's principle, taken as a rule governing the continuation and extent of any possible experience, once its invalidity as a constitutive principle of the appearances, taken in themselves, has been sufficiently demonstrated. Moreover, if we can set that validity beyond doubt before our eyes, the conflict of reason with itself is brought entirely to an end, since not only is the illusion that had set it at variance with itself removed through critical resolution, but in its place the sense in which reason accords with itself — and whose misinterpretation alone occasioned the conflict — is opened up, and a principle that was otherwise dialectical is transformed into a doctrinal one. Indeed, if this principle can be vindicated in its subjective significance — namely, to determine the understanding's greatest possible use in experience in a way conformable to that experience's objects — then it amounts to just as much as if, in the manner of an axiom (which, from pure reason, is impossible), it determined the objects in themselves a priori; for even the latter could have no greater influence, with respect to the objects of experience, upon the extension and correction of our cognition than by proving itself active in the most extensive empirical use of our understanding.

I. Solution of the cosmological idea of the totality of the composition of appearances of a cosmic whole.

Here, as with the remaining cosmological questions, the ground of reason's regulative principle lies in this proposition: that within the empirical regress no experience of an absolute limit, and thus of no condition as one that would be empirically absolutely unconditioned, can be met with. But this rests on the following: that any such experience would need to harbor within itself a bounding of the appearances through nothing, or the void, on which the prolonged regress might come to strike by way of a perception—something that cannot be.

This proposition now, which asserts neither more nor less than that in the empirical regress I reach at every step only a condition that must itself, in turn, be counted as empirically conditioned, carries the rule in terminis: that, no matter how far up the ascending series I may have come, I have on every occasion to inquire after some higher member of the series, whether or not this comes to be known to me through experience.

Now, to solve the first cosmological problem, nothing more is needed than to settle the following: whether, in the regress toward the cosmic whole's unconditioned magnitude (with respect to time and to space), this never-bounded ascent is to be called a regression into the infinite, or merely an indeterminably continued regress (in indefinitum).

The bare, general representation of the whole succession of past world-states, and equally of the things that exist together in cosmic space, is nothing in itself but a possible empirical regress, one that I entertain, though as yet indeterminately, and by means of which alone the concept of such a chain of conditions running up to the given perception can first take shape .⁵⁵ Now, at every point I possess the cosmic whole in concept alone, and in no way (as a whole) within intuition. Its magnitude, therefore, affords me no inference to that of the regress, such that I could fix the latter by the former; instead I have first to fashion for myself, out of the magnitude of the empirical regress, a concept of how large the world is. Yet concerning that regress I never learn more than this: that from any member already given in the series of conditions I am bound to advance, empirically, to one that lies higher (further off). Thus the magnitude of the whole of the appearances is thereby not determined absolutely at all, and accordingly one also cannot say that this regress proceeds into the infinite, because this would anticipate the members which the regress has not yet reached and depict their multitude as so vast that no empirical synthesis could ever reach it, and would in consequence determine the world's magnitude ahead of the regress (if only negatively)—which cannot be. For no intuition presents the world to me (in its totality), so that even its magnitude remains, before the regress, wholly ungiven. This being so, of the world's magnitude taken in itself there is nothing whatever we may assert—not even that a regressus in infinitum occurs within it; we are left only to seek the concept of that magnitude by the rule which governs the empirical regress inside it. And what that rule enjoins amounts to no more than this: that no matter how far we have pushed into the series of empirical conditions, at no point are we to posit an absolute limit, but are to place each appearance, as something conditioned, under another that serves as its condition, and so to press on toward the latter—precisely the regressus in indefinitum, which, since it settles no magnitude in the object, stands sufficiently apart from the in infinitum.

I therefore cannot say: the world is infinite with respect to past time or to space. For any such concept—magnitude taken as an infinity already given—is of empirical origin, and therefore, once the world is considered as an object of the senses, flatly impossible. Nor shall I say: the regress from a given perception onward to everything that this bounds within a series, in past time no less than in space, proceeds into the infinite; for this presupposes the world's infinite magnitude; nor: it is finite; for the absolute limit is likewise empirically impossible. It follows that I can pronounce nothing upon the object of experience in its entirety (the world of sense), but only upon the rule whereby experience, fitted to its object, ought to be set up and carried onward.

On the cosmological question of the world's magnitude, then, the first, negative answer is this: the world has no initial beginning in time and no outermost boundary as regards space.

For, were it otherwise, it would find its bounds on the one side in empty time and on the other in empty space. Now since, as appearance, it can be neither of the two in itself—for an appearance is not a thing in itself—there would have to be possible a perception of the bounding by absolutely empty time or empty space, through which these ends of the world would come to be given within a possible experience. Yet an experience of that kind, utterly void of content, is not to be had. Hence an absolute limit of the world is empirically, and consequently also utterly, impossible⁵⁶.

There emerges from this, in the same stroke, the affirmative reply: that the regress through the series of the world's appearances, being a way of determining how large the world is, runs in indefinitum—which amounts to saying that the world of sense has no absolute magnitude, while the empirical regress (the sole avenue by which the world can be presented on the side of what conditions it) is governed by a rule, namely to move from any member of the series, taken as a conditioned, ever onward to one yet more distant (be it by firsthand experience, by the thread that history supplies, or by the linkage of causes with their effects), and never to hold oneself back from widening the possible empirical employment of the understanding—this being, indeed, the genuine and unique task of reason in dealing with its principles.

A determinate empirical regress that would run on unceasingly within some given kind of appearances is not thereby laid down—for instance, that beginning from a living human being one would have to climb ever upward through a line of ancestors without expecting a first couple, or through the series of heavenly bodies without conceding an outermost sun; rather, all that is commanded is the passage from appearances to appearances, even should these furnish no actual perception (when it is, in degree, too faint for our consciousness to amount to experience), since they belong for all that to possible experience.

All beginning is in time, and all limit of the extended is in space. But space and time have their place only within the world of sense. Hence conditionality attaches only to appearances in the world, while the world itself is neither conditioned nor limited in any unconditioned fashion.

For just this reason—and because the world can at no time be had as a whole, and even the series of conditions belonging to a given conditioned cannot, qua world-series, be furnished as a whole—the concept of the world's magnitude is yielded only by way of the regress, and not in advance of it within a collective intuition. The former, however, resides always solely in the determining of magnitude and hence delivers no determinate concept—thus no concept, either, of a magnitude that, measured against some given standard, would be infinite; it does not, then, run into the infinite (as though this were something given), but into an indeterminate reach, in order to supply a magnitude (belonging to experience) that only through this regress attains actuality.

II. Solution of the cosmological idea of the totality of the division of a given whole in intuition.

In dividing a whole given in intuition, I advance from a conditioned thing back to the conditions on which its possibility rests. Dividing the parts in turn (subdivisio or decompositio) amounts to a regress along the series formed by such conditions. Only if the regress could arrive at simple parts would the absolute totality of this series be given. But if all the parts remain divisible again and again throughout a continuously advancing decomposition, then the division — that is, the regress — proceeds from the conditioned to its conditions in infinitum, for the conditions (namely the parts) already lie within the conditioned itself, and since the latter is given entire in an intuition shut in between its boundaries, they too are, one and all, given right along with it. The regress here may accordingly not be styled a mere retreat in indefinitum, as the earlier cosmological idea alone allowed, where I had to pass from the conditioned to conditions that lay beyond it, conditions therefore not co-given with it at once but first supervening in the empirical regress. Despite this, one is in no way entitled to say, of a whole divisible to infinity in this manner: that it consists of infinitely many parts. For even though every part is contained within the whole's intuition, that intuition does not contain the entire division within it, a division residing solely in the ongoing decomposition, or in the regress itself, which is what first renders the series actual. Since this regress is now infinite, all the members (parts) it reaches are indeed contained in the given whole as aggregates, yet not the entire series of the division, which is successively infinite and never whole, and can therefore exhibit no infinite multitude, nor any combining of such a multitude into a whole.

This general reminder can, to begin with, be applied to space with great ease. Any space intuited within its limits is a whole of this kind, whose parts, under every decomposition, remain spaces once again, and for that reason it admits of division to infinity.

From this the second application follows just as naturally, namely to an outer appearance (body) shut in within its boundaries. The divisibility of the body is founded upon that of space, which is what makes a body possible as an extended whole. The body is thus divisible to infinity, yet without thereby consisting of infinitely many parts.

It does indeed appear that, because a body must be represented as a substance in space, it will differ from space in this very respect as regards the law of the divisibility of space; for one might at most concede that decomposition in the latter can never abolish all composition, since then even the whole of space, which apart from that has nothing self-subsistent about it, would cease (which is impossible); but that, were all composition of matter cancelled in thought, nothing whatever should remain over, seems not to square with the concept of a substance, which ought properly to be the subject of all composition and would have to persist in its elements even if the linkage of them in space, through which they constitute a body, were cancelled. Yet with that which in the appearance is termed substance, matters stand otherwise than one would suppose of a thing in itself through a pure concept of the understanding. The former is no absolute subject, but an abiding image of sensibility and nothing but an intuition, in which nothing unconditioned is met with anywhere at all.

Now although this rule of progression to infinity applies beyond doubt when we subdivide an appearance regarded as nothing but a filling of space, it nevertheless cannot hold if we also mean to extend it to the multitude of parts already, in a certain manner, set off within the given whole, whereby these constitute a quantum discretum. To suppose that in every articulated (organized) whole each part is again articulated, and that in this way, on breaking the parts down to infinity, one keeps meeting fresh artfully formed parts — in a word, that the whole is articulated to infinity — simply cannot be thought, though it can well be thought that the parts of matter may be articulated to infinity in the course of their decomposition. For the fact that a given appearance in space divides without end rests entirely on this, that thereby merely the divisibility is given — that is, a multitude of parts in itself wholly indeterminate — while the parts themselves come to be given and determined solely by means of the subdivision; in brief, that the whole is not, in itself, already partitioned. Hence the division is able to fix within it a multitude reaching just as far as one cares to press on in the regress of the division. In an organic body articulated to infinity, on the other hand, the whole is, precisely through this concept, already represented as partitioned, and a multitude of parts determinate in itself, yet infinite, is encountered in it ahead of all regress of the division; whereby one falls into contradiction with oneself, since this infinite enfolding is taken to be a series that can never be brought to completion (infinite) and yet, all the same, is regarded as completed in a single act of comprehension. Infinite division marks out the appearance merely as a quantum continuum and is inseparable from the filling of space, precisely because it is in this very filling that the ground of infinite divisibility lies. But the moment something is taken to be a quantum discretum, the multitude of unities in it stands determined, and is thus on every occasion equal to a number. How far, then, the organization in an articulated body may reach can be made out by experience alone, and even should it with certainty never attain any inorganic part, such parts must at any rate lie within possible experience. Yet just how far an appearance admits of transcendental division at all is in no way a matter of experience, but a principle of reason: never to regard the empirical regress in the breaking-down of what is extended — as the nature of this appearance requires — as being simply complete.

Concluding remark on the solution of the mathematical-transcendental ideas, and preliminary remark on the solution of the dynamical-transcendental ideas.

When we presented the antinomy of pure reason across all the transcendental ideas in a single table, and there pointed out the ground of this conflict along with the one means of removing it—which lay in the fact that both of the mutually opposed claims were pronounced false: we everywhere represented the conditions as belonging to their conditioned in keeping with relations of space and time, this being the usual assumption of ordinary human understanding, upon which, indeed, that conflict rested in its entirety. In this respect, too, every dialectical representation of totality within the series of conditions belonging to a given conditioned was, through and through, of the same kind. It was always one series, in which the condition, together with the conditioned, was joined as a member of that same series and thereby rendered homogeneous, so that the regress could never be thought as completed—or else, were this to occur, a member that is in itself conditioned would falsely have to be assumed as a first, and hence as unconditioned. Thus, while it was not everywhere the object, i.e., the conditioned, it was nevertheless the series of conditions leading up to it that came under consideration merely with respect to its magnitude, and here lay the difficulty, a difficulty that could be removed by no settlement but solely by severing the knot altogether, namely that reason rendered it, for the understanding, either too long or too short, with the result that the understanding could never come up to reason's idea.

Here, however, we have overlooked an essential difference prevailing among the objects—that is, among those concepts of the understanding that reason seeks to elevate into ideas—inasmuch as, by our table of the categories set out above, two of these signify a mathematical synthesis of the appearances, while the other two signify a dynamical one. Up to this point this could well pass without notice, since, just as in the general presentation of all the transcendental ideas we always remained under conditions within appearance, so too in the two mathematical-transcendental ones we had no other object than one within appearance. Now, though, in advancing to those dynamical concepts of the understanding that are to be adapted to the idea of reason, that distinction takes on weight and discloses to us a wholly new outlook upon the litigation in which reason finds itself entangled; and this litigation, which previously, as built upon false presuppositions on both sides, had been dismissed, can now—since perhaps in the dynamical antinomy there occurs a presupposition of the kind that can subsist together with reason's pretension, and since the judge makes good the deficiency of the legal grounds that both parties had failed to recognize—be settled to the satisfaction of both sides from this standpoint, which is something that could not be done in the dispute of the mathematical antinomy.

To be sure, the series of conditions are all homogeneous insofar as one looks merely to their extent: whether they are adequate to the idea, or whether they are too large or too small for it. But the concept of the understanding that underlies these ideas contains either merely a synthesis of the homogeneous (something that is presupposed in every magnitude, alike in its composition and in its division), or else one of the heterogeneous, which can at least be admitted in the dynamical synthesis both of the causal connection and of the necessary with the contingent.

This is how it comes about that into the mathematical linkage of the series of appearances there can enter no condition other than a sensible one—that is, such as itself forms part of the series; whereas the dynamical series of sensible conditions does, for all that, admit a heterogeneous condition, one that forms no part of the series but, as merely intelligible, lies outside it, whereby reason is given satisfaction and the unconditioned is placed above the appearances, without on that account throwing the series of the latter—conditioned as it always is—into disorder, or breaking it off in a manner contrary to the principles of the understanding.

Now, in that the dynamical ideas permit a condition of the appearances outside the series of those appearances—that is, a condition which is not itself an appearance—there comes about something wholly distinct from the upshot of the mathematical antinomy. For the latter brought it about that both dialectical counter-assertions had to be declared false. By contrast, the thoroughly conditioned character of the dynamical series, which is inseparable from them as appearances, when linked with the condition that is indeed empirically unconditioned but also non-sensible, can satisfy the understanding on the one side and reason on the other,⁵⁷ and, since the dialectical arguments that sought unconditioned totality in mere appearances in one way or another thereby fall away, the propositions of reason, on the other hand, taken in the sense thus corrected, can both be true; something that can never occur in the case of the cosmological ideas, which concern merely mathematically unconditioned unity, because in their case no condition of the series of appearances is met with except one that is itself also an appearance and, as such, constitutes yet another member of the series.

III. Solution of the cosmological ideas of the totality of the derivation of cosmic events from their causes.

With respect to what happens, only two sorts of causality are thinkable: either one conforming to nature or one arising from freedom. The first is the tie binding one state to an earlier state within the sensory world, such that the one succeeds the other by a rule. Now, because the causality of appearances is grounded in temporal conditions, and because an antecedent state, had it subsisted for all time, could not itself have generated an effect that begins only within time, the causality belonging to the cause of whatever happens or arises has come to be as well, and, on the understanding's own principle, once again stands in need of a cause.

Freedom in the cosmological sense, by contrast, I take to mean the power to initiate a state of itself, a power whose causality is accordingly not itself subordinated, under natural law, to a further cause that would fix its position in time. Understood thus, freedom is a purely transcendental idea: one that, in the first place, incorporates nothing drawn from experience, and whose object, in the second place, can never be exhibited as determinate in any experience, for it belongs to the universal law conditioning the very possibility of all experience that whatever occurs has a cause, so that the causality of that cause—which itself happened or arose—must once more possess a cause of its own; and by this the whole domain of experience, to whatever extent it may reach, gets converted into an aggregate of sheer nature. Yet since no absolute totality of conditions within the causal nexus can be reached along that route, reason contrives for itself the idea of a spontaneity capable of commencing activity on its own, with no prior cause required to determine it, in its turn, to that activity in keeping with the law of causal linkage.

It is highly striking that the practical concept of freedom should rest upon this transcendental idea of freedom, and that the latter should be, within the practical concept, the genuine seat of the difficulties which have always hemmed in the question of freedom's very possibility. Freedom in the practical sense amounts to the independence of free choice from necessitation by sensibility's promptings. For a free choice counts as sensible in the measure that it is pathologically affected (through the moving grounds of sensibility); it earns the name animal (arbitrium brutum) where it admits of being pathologically necessitated. The human power of choice is, to be sure, an arbitrium sensitivum, though not brutum but rather liberum, since sensibility does not make its action necessary, there residing instead in the human being a power to settle himself, on his own, apart from any necessitation by sensible promptings.

It is not hard to see that, were all causality within the sensory world nothing but nature, then each event would find its determination in another within time, under necessary laws; and consequently, since appearances—so far as they determine choice—would be obliged to make every action necessary as the natural upshot of themselves, the cancellation of transcendental freedom would simultaneously annihilate all practical freedom. For practical freedom takes for granted that, even though a thing has not come about, it nonetheless ought to have come about, and that its cause among appearances was thus not so determinative as to rule out a causality lodged in our choice—one able to bring forth, independently of those natural causes and even in defiance of their might and sway, something determined within the temporal order by empirical laws, and hence to inaugurate a series of events quite of itself.

What comes to light here, then, is just what one meets with generally in the conflict of a reason that hazards itself past the frontiers of possible experience: that the problem is, strictly speaking, not physiological but transcendental. Thus the question of freedom's possibility does indeed press upon psychology, but, resting as it does on the dialectical arguments of merely pure reason, it—along with its resolution—must be the concern of transcendental philosophy and of it alone. To equip that discipline—which is not at liberty to refuse a satisfying answer on the matter—for the task, I must, before anything else, endeavor to pin down its procedure here somewhat more exactly by way of a remark.

Supposing appearances were things in themselves, and space and time therefore forms under which things in themselves exist, then conditions and conditioned would invariably belong, as members, to one and the same series, and out of this there would arise, in the present case too, the antinomy shared by all transcendental ideas—namely, that such a series must inescapably prove either too great or too small for the understanding. The dynamical concepts of reason, however—our concern in this number and the next—carry this peculiarity: inasmuch as they bear not on an object regarded as a magnitude but solely on its existence, one may likewise leave aside the magnitude of the series of conditions and attend, in their case, only to the dynamical bearing of condition upon conditioned; so that in the question of nature and freedom we run up against the difficulty, at the outset, whether freedom is so much as possible anywhere, and, granting that it is, whether it can stand together with the universality of the natural law of causality; hence whether the proposition be a rightly disjunctive one—that every effect in the world must issue either from nature or from freedom—or whether, rather, both may not obtain at once, in differing regards, in one and the same event. The soundness of that principle—that all events of the sensory world hang together thoroughly under unalterable natural laws—already stands firm, qua principle of the transcendental analytic, and no harm befalls it. So the sole question is this: whether, in spite of that, freedom may also have a place in regard to the very effect that nature determines, or whether that inviolable rule shuts it out completely. And at this point the widespread yet deceiving assumption of the absolute reality of appearances promptly reveals its detrimental power to throw reason into confusion. For if appearances be things in themselves, freedom is past saving. Then nature is the entire and, of itself, adequately determining cause of each event, whose condition is on every occasion contained solely within the series of appearances that, together with their effect, fall necessarily under the law of nature. If, on the other hand, appearances are held to be nothing beyond what they actually are—not things in themselves, that is, but mere representations interlinked by empirical laws—then they must themselves have further grounds that are not appearances. Such an intelligible cause, though, is, as regards its causality, not determined by appearances, even while its effects do appear and can accordingly be determined by other appearances. Hence it lies, together with its causality, outside the series, while its effects are to be found within the series of empirical conditions. The effect may therefore be viewed as free with respect to its intelligible cause, and yet, with respect to the appearances, as a result flowing from them by nature's necessity—a distinction which, laid out in general terms and wholly in the abstract, is bound to look exceedingly subtle and obscure, but which will grow clear in the applying. My only aim here has been to note this: that, since the thoroughgoing interconnection of all appearances within one fabric of nature is a law that grants no reprieve, it would of necessity topple all freedom were one to insist obstinately on the reality of appearances. And this is why those who, on this head, go along with the common opinion have never managed to reach a reconciliation of nature with freedom.

Possibility of causality through freedom, in harmony with the universal law of natural necessity.

I term intelligible that which, in an object of the senses, is not itself an appearance. If, then, whatever has to be viewed within the sensory world as appearance possesses, in its own self, a power that is no object of sensible intuition and yet by which it can be the cause of appearances: then the causality of this being admits of being regarded from two sides—as intelligible with regard to its action, this being a thing in itself, and as sensible with regard to its effects, taken as an appearance within the sensory world. Of the power possessed by such a subject we would, on this basis, frame a concept of its causality that is at once empirical and intellectual, both aspects concurring in one and the same effect. To think the power of an object of the senses under such a twofold aspect conflicts with none of the concepts we are obliged to frame regarding appearances and regarding a possible experience. For, since these appearances, not being things in their own right, must rest upon a transcendental object that determines them as nothing more than representations, nothing stands in the way of our ascribing to this transcendental object, over and above the property whereby it appears, a causality as well that is no appearance, even though its effect is met with in the appearance nonetheless. Yet every efficient cause must possess a character—that is to say, a law of its causality—for lacking this it would be no cause whatever. And so, in a subject belonging to the sensory world, we would in the first place find an empirical character, by which its actions, qua appearances, would hang together with other appearances entirely under unvarying laws of nature, could be derived from those appearances as their conditions, and would thereby, joined with them, form links in one single series of the order of nature. In the second place, one would have to concede to it an intelligible character as well, by virtue of which it is, to be sure, the cause of those same actions as appearances, while it itself stands under no conditions of sensibility and is no appearance at all. One might likewise name the former the character of such a thing as it is in appearance, and the latter the character of the thing as it is in itself.

Now this acting subject, taken according to its intelligible character, would be subject to no temporal conditions whatsoever, for time conditions only appearances and not things as they are in themselves. Within it no action would come to be or pass out of being, and hence it would not fall under the law binding all determination of time and everything mutable—namely, that whatever happens finds its cause in the appearances (of the preceding state). To put it in a word, so far as its causality is intellectual, it would lie wholly outside the sequence of empirical conditions by which the occurrence in the sensory world is made necessary. This intelligible character, admittedly, could never be known directly, since nothing is perceptible to us save insofar as it appears; nevertheless it would have to be thought as answering to the empirical character, exactly as we are quite generally required to lay a transcendental object beneath appearances in our thought, notwithstanding that we know nothing of what it may be in its own self.

According to its empirical character, therefore, this subject, as appearance, would be subject to every law of determination proceeding by causal connection; and so far it would amount to nothing more than a portion of the sensory world, whose effects, no differently from any other appearance, would issue unfailingly from nature. The moment outer appearances flowed into it, and the moment its empirical character—the law, that is, governing its causality—had been cognized through experience, every one of its actions would have to admit of explanation by laws of nature, and whatever is requisite for their complete and necessary determination would have to be discoverable within a possible experience.

In respect of its intelligible character, however (albeit of this we can possess nothing beyond its general concept), that same subject would nonetheless have to be pronounced free of every influence of sensibility and of all determination by appearances; and because within it, so far as it counts as noumenon, nothing happens—no change calling for a dynamical determination of time, and consequently no linkage with appearances in the role of causes is to be met with—this active being would in that respect be, in its actions, independent of and free from all natural necessity, such as is encountered solely within the sensory world. One could say of it, with perfect correctness, that it initiates its effects in the sensory world of itself, though the action does not begin in it itself; and this would hold good without the effects in the sensory world being entitled on that account to begin of themselves, since within that world they are at every moment determined beforehand by empirical conditions in the antecedent time—yet only by way of the empirical character (which is nothing but the appearance of the intelligible)—and are possible merely as a prolongation of the chain of natural causes. In this way freedom and nature, each in its complete meaning, would be encountered at one and the same time and without any conflict whatever in the very same actions, according as they are compared with their cause taken as intelligible or as sensible.

Explanation of the cosmological idea of freedom in connection with universal natural necessity.

It has seemed to me advisable to trace first, in bare outline, the manner in which our transcendental problem admits of solution, so that the course reason follows in solving it may be surveyed with greater ease. We shall now set out the several moments of reason's verdict—the points on which the matter genuinely hinges—and take each of them under separate consideration.

The law of nature—that whatever occurs has its cause; that the causality of this cause, namely the action, inasmuch as it goes before in time and, with regard to an effect that has arisen, cannot itself have existed at all times but must rather have happened, in turn has its own cause among the appearances by which it is determined; and that accordingly every event within an order of nature is empirically determined: this law, whereby appearances are first made into a nature at all and become capable of furnishing objects for an experience, is a law of the understanding which on no pretext may be forsaken, nor may any appearance be withdrawn from its scope; for one would thereby remove that appearance beyond all possible experience, distinguishing it in that very act from every object of possible experience , and turning it into a bare entity of thought and a figment of the imagination.

Although at this point everything appears to rest upon nothing but a chain of causes that, in the regress toward its conditions, tolerates no absolute totality at all, this misgiving in no way holds us up; for it was already removed in the general appraisal of reason's antinomy, at the point where reason, within the series of appearances, sets out after the unconditioned. Should we consent to the deception of transcendental realism, then nothing remains—neither nature nor freedom. The sole question at issue here is this: supposing that one recognizes, across the whole series of all events, pure natural necessity alone, whether it is still possible to view one and the very same event—which on one side is nothing but an effect of nature—as being, on the other side, an effect arising out of freedom; or whether, between these two sorts of causality, an outright contradiction is encountered.

Certainly, nothing can be found among the causes in appearance capable of initiating a series absolutely and out of itself. Any action, taken as appearance, in so far as it gives rise to an event, is itself an event or occurrence presupposing a prior state wherein its cause resides; and thus whatever happens is but a prolonging of the series, so that no self-originating beginning is possible within it. All actions of natural causes in the succession of time are, therefore, themselves once more effects, which no less presuppose their own causes within the temporal series. An original action—one by which something comes to pass that formerly was not—is not to be looked for in the causal nexus of appearances.

But is it truly necessary that, when the effects are appearances, the causality of their cause—the cause, that is, being itself likewise appearance—should be nothing but empirical? And is it not, on the contrary, possible that, even though for each effect in appearance a linkage with its cause under laws of empirical causality is unquestionably demanded, this empirical causality might nonetheless, without disturbing in the slightest its connection with the causes of nature, be the effect of a causality that is not empirical but intelligible? that is, the effect of an action original in regard to appearances, belonging to a cause which to that extent is thus not appearance but, in respect of this power, intelligible, granted that in every other respect it must, as one member of nature's chain, be reckoned along with the world of sense.

The principle of the causality of appearances among themselves is indispensable to us if we are to be able to look for, and to assign, natural conditions—causes, that is, in appearance—for natural events. If this is conceded and undermined by no exception, then the understanding—which, in its empirical employment, discerns nothing but nature in every event and is fully within its rights to do so—holds everything it is able to require, and physical explanations pursue their unobstructed course. Now no harm whatever is done to it—even granting that the supposition should be a mere invention besides—by assuming that among the causes of nature there are likewise some endowed with a power that is intelligible alone, seeing that what determines this power to act reposes never on empirical conditions but purely on grounds of the understanding, yet in such fashion that the action in the appearance proceeding from this cause conforms to every law of empirical causality. For on this footing the agent, as causa phaenomenon, would be linked to nature in an inseverable dependence of all its acts, and only the phaenomenon of this subject (with all the causality it exhibits in appearance) would carry certain conditions that, should one wish to climb from the empirical object up to the transcendental one, would have to be taken as merely intelligible. For so long as, in whatever may serve as cause among the appearances, we do but keep to the rule of nature, we may stay untroubled as to what ground for these appearances and their interconnection is being conceived within the transcendental subject, which remains empirically unknown to us. That intelligible ground does not so much as touch the empirical questions; it has to do, perhaps, merely with the thinking carried on in pure understanding; and though the effects of such thinking and acting of pure understanding do turn up in the appearances, these must all the same admit of being explained completely, from their cause in appearance, according to laws of nature—one taking their merely empirical character for the highest ground of explanation, and passing over altogether, as something unknown, the intelligible character that forms the transcendental cause of the former, save in so far as it is exhibited through the empirical character alone, as the sensible sign of it. Let this be brought to bear upon experience. The human being belongs among the appearances of the sensible world, and so far he is likewise one of the causes of nature, whose causality has to stand beneath empirical laws. Being such a cause, he must, accordingly, carry an empirical character too, as do all other things of nature. We take note of it by way of the forces and powers that he manifests in his effects. In the case of nature that is lifeless, or merely animal in its animation, we come upon no reason to conceive any power otherwise than as conditioned in a purely sensible way. The human being alone, however, who is otherwise acquainted with the whole of nature through the senses only, has cognizance of himself also through bare apperception—and that, moreover, in actions and inner determinations which he can by no means class among the impressions of sense—and is, to be sure, to himself in one part a phenomenon, but in another part, namely with respect to certain powers, an object that is merely intelligible, since the activity of this being cannot be reckoned to the receptivity of sensibility in any way. These powers we name understanding and reason; the latter above all is marked off, in the fullest and most distinctive manner, from every empirically conditioned power, in that it ponders its objects solely in the light of ideas and thereupon determines the understanding, which then proceeds to make an empirical use of its concepts (pure though these also are).

That this reason does possess causality—or, at the least, that we picture to ourselves some such causality in it—is evident from the imperatives that, throughout the whole practical sphere, we lay down as rules for the powers that carry them out. The ought gives voice to a species of necessity and of connection with grounds such as is met with nowhere else in the whole of nature. Concerning nature, the understanding is able to cognize only what there is, or what has been, or what will be. That anything therein ought to be otherwise than, in all these relations of time, it actually is, is impossible; indeed, the ought, if one has nothing but the course of nature in view, is wholly without any meaning at all. It is not open to us to ask what in nature ought to take place—no more than to ask what properties a circle ought to bear—but only what does take place therein, or what properties the latter actually possesses.

This ought, then, gives expression to a possible action, the ground of which is nothing beyond a mere concept, whereas with a merely natural action the ground must invariably be an appearance. Granted, the action has indeed to be possible under conditions of nature if the ought is aimed at it; those natural conditions, however, bear not upon the determining of the free choice itself, but only upon the effect and issue of that choice in appearance. Let there be ever so many grounds in nature spurring me to willing, ever so many sensible enticements, still they cannot beget the ought, but only a willing that is as yet far from necessary and is throughout conditioned, against which the ought pronounced by reason sets up measure and aim—nay, prohibition and authority. Be the object one of mere sensibility (the agreeable) or else of pure reason (the good): reason does not defer to the ground that is given empirically, nor does it comply with the order of things as these display themselves in appearance; rather, in complete spontaneity it frames for itself an order of its own after ideas, into which it accommodates the empirical conditions, and by which it goes so far as to pronounce necessary even actions that have not happened and will perhaps never happen—assuming, all the while, of every one of them that reason is able to have causality in respect of it; for otherwise it would not look for effects of its ideas within experience.

Let us come to a stand at this point and grant, at least as a possibility , that reason genuinely has causality in respect of the appearances: then, however much it is reason all the same, it must yet exhibit an empirical character of its own, for a cause always presupposes a rule whereby certain appearances ensue as its effects, and every rule calls for a uniformity in those effects—a uniformity founding the concept of the cause (taken as a power)—which concept, in so far as it has to become manifest out of mere appearances, we may term its empirical character, a character that abides constant, while the effects, according to the diversity of the attendant and in part restricting conditions, present themselves in shifting shapes.

Every human being, accordingly, has an empirical character of his free choice, and this is nothing but a certain causality of his reason, in so far as that reason exhibits, in its effects within appearance, a rule by which the grounds of reason and their actions may be gauged as to their kind and their degrees, and the subjective principles of his free choice appraised. Because this empirical character has itself to be derived from the appearances taken as effect, and from their rule, which experience places at our disposal: every action of the human being in appearance stands determined, following the order of nature, out of his empirical character together with the other contributing causes; and were we able to probe every one of the appearances of his free choice down to the very bottom, there would not be a single human action we could fail to foretell with certainty and to cognize as necessary from the conditions preceding it. As regards this empirical character, then, freedom is nowhere to be found, and it is by this alone that the human being can nonetheless be viewed, whenever we mean simply to observe and, after the fashion of anthropology, to trace out physiologically the moving causes behind his actions.

But when we take these very same actions in their bearing on reason—and that, be it noted, not the speculative reason, so as to explain them by their origin, but purely in so far as reason is the cause that itself generates them; in a word, when we set them beside reason with a practical intent—we then light upon a rule and order of an entirely different kind from the order that nature is. For in that light, it may be, all that ought not to have happened which has, notwithstanding, in the course of nature happened and, by its empirical grounds, could not fail to happen. At times, however, we discover—or fancy at any rate that we discover—that the ideas of reason have in fact evinced causality in respect of the actions of the human being as appearances, and that these came about not because empirical causes determined them, but on the contrary because they were determined by grounds of reason.

Now let it be supposed that one could say reason has causality in respect of appearance: might the action proceeding from it be styled free, seeing that within its empirical character (its cast of sense) it is determined quite exactly and of necessity? This character, in its turn, is determined within the intelligible character (the cast of thought). The latter, however, is unknown to us; we mark it only through appearances, which in truth afford us immediate cognition of nothing but the cast of sense (the empirical character).⁵⁸ The action, now, in so far as it is to be laid to the cast of thought as its cause, still by no means issues from it in keeping with empirical laws—that is, not in such a way that the conditions of pure reason, but only in such a way that the effects of these within the appearance of inner sense, go before. Pure reason, being a power merely intelligible, is not subjected to the form of time, and hence neither to the conditions of temporal succession. The causality of reason in the intelligible character does not come to be, nor does it set in at some definite moment so as to bring forth an effect. For were it otherwise, it would itself lie under the natural law of appearances, in so far as that law fixes causal series in the order of time; and the causality would then be nature, and not freedom. We shall therefore be in a position to say: if reason is capable of causality with respect to appearances, it is a power through which the sensible condition of an empirical run of effects has its first onset. For the condition seated in reason is not sensible, and hence does not itself set in. In this way there comes about precisely what we found wanting in all empirical series: that the condition of a successive train of events might itself, empirically, be unconditioned. For here the condition lies beyond the series of appearances (in the intelligible), and is thus subjected to no sensible condition and to no determination in time through antecedent causes.

And yet, viewed in another relation, this identical cause belongs to the series of appearances as well. The human being is himself an appearance. His free choice bears an empirical character, and this is the (empirical) cause of everything he does. Not one of the conditions that determine the human being conformably to this character fails to be comprised within the series of natural effects and to obey the law of that series, according to which no empirically unconditioned causality is ever met with in what takes place in time. For this reason no given action (since it admits of being perceived only as appearance) can commence absolutely of itself. Of reason, however, one cannot say that some prior state precedes the state wherein it determines the free choice—a prior state in which this latter state is itself determined. For inasmuch as reason is itself no appearance and lies under no conditions of sensibility whatsoever, no succession in time obtains within reason itself with regard to its causality, and so the dynamical law of nature, which fixes temporal succession by rules, admits of no application to it.

Reason, then, is the enduring condition of all the voluntary actions under which the human being makes his appearance. Every one of these stands determined beforehand in the empirical character of the human being, prior to its ever occurring. With respect to the intelligible character, of which the empirical is but the sensible schema, there holds no earlier or later; and every action, regardless of the temporal relation it bears toward other appearances, is the unmediated effect of the intelligible character of pure reason, which thus acts in freedom, without being determined dynamically, within the chain of natural causes, by grounds that—whether outward or inward—are yet antecedent in time; and this freedom of reason may be construed not merely negatively, as an independence from empirical conditions (for by that the power of reason would leave off being a cause of the appearances ), but may also be denoted positively, as a power to inaugurate of itself a series of events, in such wise that within reason itself nothing begins, but rather that reason, as the unconditioned condition of every voluntary action, brooks above itself no conditions antecedent in time, while its effect all the same begins within the series of appearances, though it can never make up therein an absolutely first beginning.

To throw light on the regulative principle of reason by an instance drawn from its empirical employment—not to establish it (for proofs of such a sort avail nothing for transcendental assertions)—let a voluntary action be taken up, say a malicious lie, whereby a man has introduced a certain disorder into society; and let it first be examined with regard to the motive causes from which it sprang, and thereupon appraised as to how it, along with its consequences, may be charged to his account. Under the first head, one works through his empirical character right down to its wellsprings, which one hunts out in a defective upbringing, in bad associations, in part too in the wickedness of a disposition impervious to shame, and in part lays at the door of levity and rashness; nor, in doing so, does one lose sight of the occasioning circumstances that gave rise to it. Throughout all this, one goes to work exactly as one does in tracing the series of determining causes for any given effect of nature. Yet, however much one holds the action to be determined thereby, one blames the doer none the less—and that not for his ill-starred disposition, not for the circumstances playing upon him, nor even for the life he has led up to now; for one takes for granted that one may put wholly to one side how that life was constituted, may treat the past series of conditions as though it had never been, and may regard this deed as utterly unconditioned in respect of the foregoing state, as if with it the doer set going a series of consequences wholly of himself. This censure rests upon a law of reason, whereby one looks on reason as a cause that, in defiance of all the aforementioned empirical conditions, both could and ought to have shaped the man's conduct otherwise. And indeed one views the causality of reason not as some mere concurrence alongside others, but as complete in and of itself, even should the sensible springs of action have stood by no means for it but rather flatly against it; the deed is charged to his intelligible character, and at this moment, the moment in which he tells the lie, the guilt is wholly his; reason, consequently, notwithstanding all the empirical conditions of the deed, was entirely free, and to its default this deed is wholly to be charged.

One readily perceives from this imputing judgment that what one has in mind is this: that reason is in no way affected by all that sensibility; that it does not undergo alteration (though its appearances, that is, the manner in which it shows itself in its effects, do alter); that within it no state goes before that would determine the state to follow; and hence that it does not fall at all within the series of sensible conditions which render the appearances necessary in accordance with laws of nature. Reason—it—is present, one and the same, to every action of the human being amid all circumstances of time; yet it is not itself in time, nor does it pass into some fresh state in which it was not before; in respect of that state it is determining, but not determinable. One cannot, therefore, put the question: why has reason not determined itself otherwise? but only: why has it, by its causality, not determined the appearances otherwise? To this, however, no answer can be given. For a different intelligible character would have yielded a different empirical one; and when we say that, in spite of the whole course of life led up to that point, the doer might yet have left the lie unspoken, this signifies merely that the lie stands immediately under reason's sway, that reason in its causality lies under no conditions of appearance or of time's passage, and that the difference of time, while indeed it makes a chief difference among appearances relatively to one another, can—since appearances are no things, and hence no causes in themselves—make no difference in the action as it bears on reason.

In appraising free actions with regard to their causality, then, we can advance only as far as the intelligible cause, but no further than it; we can cognize that it is free—determined, that is, independently of sensibility—and, on such a footing, that it may be the sensibly unconditioned condition of the appearances. Why, however, the intelligible character, under the circumstances at hand, yields just these appearances and this empirical character —that so far outruns every power of our reason to answer, nay every title of reason so much as to ask, as though one were asking whence the transcendental object of our outer sensible intuition yields intuition only in space and no intuition of some other sort. But the problem we were charged to solve lays no such obligation on us, for it ran only thus: whether freedom stands at odds with natural necessity in one and the very same action; and this we have answered sufficiently, having shown that, since with the former a bearing upon a wholly different kind of conditions is possible than with the latter, the law of the latter leaves the former unaffected, so that the two may take place independently of, and without disturbance from, one another.

It should be well marked that we have not, by these means, sought to make out the actuality of freedom as one of the powers containing the cause of the appearances of our sensible world. For, apart from the fact that this would have been no transcendental inquiry at all—such an inquiry having to do with concepts alone—it could not, besides, have come off, since out of experience we are never able to draw an inference to anything that is simply not to be thought under laws of experience. Nor, further still, have we even sought to prove the possibility of freedom; for this too would not have come off, seeing that of no real ground and no causality whatever can we cognize the possibility out of mere concepts a priori. Freedom is dealt with here solely as a transcendental idea, whereby reason takes itself to inaugurate the series of conditions in appearance absolutely by means of the sensibly unconditioned, but in so doing becomes entangled in an antinomy with laws of its own—the laws it prescribes to the empirical employment of the understanding. That this antinomy reposes upon a mere semblance, and that nature does at least not stand at odds with a causality out of freedom—this was the one thing within our power to accomplish, and the single point that concerned us at all.

IV. Solution of the cosmological idea of the totality of appearances' dependence, taken with regard to their existence in general.

In the previous number we considered the alterations of the sensible world as they stand in their dynamical series, where each is subordinate to another that serves as its cause. Here that series of states functions for us purely as a thread by which to reach an existence capable of being the highest condition of all that is alterable — namely, the necessary being. The concern now is not with unconditioned causality, but with the unconditioned existence of the substance itself. The series before us, then, is strictly a series of concepts rather than of intuitions, to the extent that one concept furnishes the condition for another.

Yet it is easy to see: that because everything comprised in the totality of appearances is alterable, and thus conditioned as regards its existence, nowhere in the series of dependent existence could there be an unconditioned member whose existence would be necessary without qualification; and that, accordingly, if appearances were things in themselves — so that for just this reason their condition would invariably fall, along with the conditioned, into a single, self-same series of intuitions — then a necessary being could never figure as the condition under which the appearances of the sensible world exist.

The dynamical regress, however, carries within it something proper to it that sets it apart from the mathematical: namely that, whereas the mathematical has to do only with putting parts together into a whole, or with breaking a whole down into its parts — so that the conditions of such a series must invariably count as parts of it, and hence as things of the same kind, and therefore as appearances — the dynamical regress, by contrast, is concerned not with how an unconditioned whole might arise from given parts, or an unconditioned part be found for a given whole, but with tracing a state back to its cause, or the contingent existence of the substance itself back to a necessary one; and here the condition is under no obligation to form, together with the conditioned, one empirical series.

So, with the seeming antinomy that confronts us, one avenue still lies open to us: that the two mutually opposed propositions may each hold good simultaneously, though under different relations, in such a way that all things belonging to the sensible world are through and through contingent, and therefore possess an existence that is never anything but empirically conditioned, while for all that the series taken whole admits of a non-empirical condition as well — namely, an unconditionally necessary being. For such a being, being an intelligible condition, would not itself count among the members of the series (not even as its highest member), and would leave no member of the series empirically unconditioned; instead it would let the entire sensible world remain in the empirically conditioned existence that runs through each of its members. Herein, then, this manner of grounding appearances upon an unconditioned existence would part ways with the empirically unconditioned causality (freedom) of the foregoing article: for with freedom the thing itself, functioning as cause (substantia phaenomenon), still belonged within the series of conditions, and it was solely its causality that was thought as intelligible; whereas in the present case the necessary being must be thought wholly apart from the series of the sensible world (as an ens extramundanum) and as merely intelligible — which is the one and only means of keeping it from falling itself under the law governing the contingency and dependence of all appearances.

The regulative principle of reason, in view of this problem of ours, therefore runs as follows: that within the sensible world every existence is empirically conditioned, and that no property whatever, anywhere within it, carries an unconditioned necessity; that among the conditions in the series there is not one for which the empirical condition should not always be looked for in some possible experience, and pursued as far as one is able; and that nothing licenses us to trace any existence back to a condition lying beyond the empirical series, or to treat it, even within that series, as utterly self-standing and independent — though this in no way debars us from allowing that the series in its entirety might rest upon some intelligible being (one which, for that very reason, stands clear of every empirical condition, and holds instead that on which the possibility of all these appearances rests).

Nor is the aim here at all to demonstrate the unconditionally necessary existence of a being, or even merely to rest upon it the possibility of a merely intelligible condition for the existence of the appearances of the sensible world; the aim is rather only this: that, in the same way as we hold reason in check so that it will not let go of the thread of empirical conditions and lose itself among transcendent grounds of explanation that permit of no exhibition in concreto, we should on the other side likewise confine the law of the merely empirical employment of the understanding, so that it does not settle the possibility of things as such, and so that it does not, on this ground, pronounce the intelligible impossible, unusable though the intelligible be to us for explaining appearances. All that is thereby established, then, is that the sweeping contingency of every natural thing, together with every one of its (empirical) conditions, sits perfectly well alongside the arbitrary assumption of a necessary — albeit merely intelligible — condition; so that no real contradiction turns up between these two claims, and they may accordingly both alike be true. Grant that a being of the understanding of this utterly necessary kind may in itself be impossible : even so, no such conclusion can be drawn from the general contingency and dependence of all that pertains to the sensible world, nor from the principle bidding us never to come to rest at any one member of that series, in so far as it is contingent, and to appeal to a cause beyond the world. Reason pursues one path in its empirical employment and another, distinctive path in its transcendental employment.

The sensible world holds nothing beyond appearances, and these are nothing but representations, themselves in every instance sensibly conditioned; and since the objects we deal with here are never things in themselves, there is nothing surprising in the fact that we are at no point authorized to spring, from whatever member of the empirical series it might be, clean out of the web of sensibility, as if these members were things in themselves subsisting apart from their transcendental ground, things one might quit in order to hunt for the cause of their existence somewhere beyond them; a move that would, with contingent things, ultimately have to be made, but never with bare representations of things — representations whose very contingency is nothing more than phenomenon, and can issue in no regress other than the one fixing the phenomena, which is to say the empirical regress. But to conceive an intelligible ground for the appearances — that is, for the sensible world — and to conceive it as set free from the latter's contingency, runs counter neither to the unbounded empirical regress within the series of appearances nor to the through-and-through contingency of that same series. And that is likewise the sole thing we had to deliver in order to lift the seeming antinomy — the sole thing, indeed, achievable by this route alone. For if the condition belonging on each occasion to every conditioned (as regards existence) is sensible, and just on that account part of the series, then it is in its turn conditioned once more (as the antithesis of the fourth antinomy brings out). Thus either a standing conflict with reason — which insists on the unconditioned — had to persist, or else the unconditioned had to be lodged beyond the series, within the intelligible, whose necessity neither calls for nor tolerates any empirical condition, and which is, in relation to appearances, unconditionally necessary.

Reason's empirical employment — with regard to the conditions under which anything exists in the sensible world — takes no injury from our conceding a being that is merely intelligible; it advances instead, following the principle of pervasive contingency, from empirical conditions upward to higher ones that are themselves every bit as empirical. And just as little, on the other hand, does this regulative principle rule out our positing an intelligible cause standing outside the series, once the concern is with reason's pure employment (in respect of ends). For there that cause designates nothing more than the ground — for us merely transcendental and beyond our knowledge — of the possibility of the sensible series as a whole; and this ground's existence, which hangs on none of that series' conditions and, measured against them, is necessary without qualification, stands in no opposition whatever to the boundless contingency of the first, and therefore none to the regress in the series of empirical conditions that nowhere reaches its close.

Concluding remark on the entire antinomy of pure reason.

So long as, by means of our concepts of reason, we have for an object nothing more than the totality of conditions within the world of sense, together with whatever may be done with respect to them in the service of reason: our ideas are, to be sure, transcendental, and yet cosmological. But the moment we place the unconditioned (which is, after all, the real point at issue) in that which lies wholly beyond the world of sense, and thus beyond every possible experience, the ideas turn transcendent: they do not merely subserve the completing of the empirical employment of reason (an idea that forever remains one that can never be carried through, and yet must be pursued), but detach themselves from it entirely and set up objects of their own, the material of which is not taken from experience, and the objective reality of which likewise depends, not on the bringing of the empirical series to completion, but on pure a priori concepts . Transcendent ideas of this kind possess a merely intelligible object, one that it is certainly allowable to admit as a transcendental object about which, moreover, nothing is known, but for the thinking of which — that is, in order to think it as a thing determinable through the predicates that distinguish it and that belong to it inwardly — we possess on our part neither any grounds for its possibility (as something independent of every concept of experience) nor the least justification for assuming any such object, so that it amounts to a mere thought-entity. And yet, among all the cosmological ideas, it is precisely the one that occasioned the fourth antinomy which drives us to hazard this step. For the existence of appearances — an existence in no way grounded in itself, but on the contrary always conditioned — summons us: to cast about for something differing from all appearances, that is, for an intelligible object, in which this contingency might cease. But since, once we have allowed ourselves the liberty of positing, beyond the field of sensibility taken as a whole, an actuality subsisting on its own account, appearances can then be viewed only as contingent ways of representing intelligible objects on the part of beings that are themselves intelligences: nothing further is left to us than the analogy according to which we press the concepts of experience into service so as to fashion at least some concept of intelligible things, of which, in themselves, we have not the least acquaintance. Since the contingent becomes known to us in no other way than through experience, whereas what is at issue here are things that are meant to be no objects of experience whatsoever, we shall be obliged to draw our acquaintance with them from that which is in itself necessary, from pure concepts of things as such. The first step we take beyond the world of sense accordingly obliges us to open our new acquaintance with an inquiry into the being that is absolutely necessary, and, out of the concepts belonging to that being, to work out the concepts of all things in the measure that they are merely intelligible; and this attempt we mean to undertake in the chapter that follows.

Chapter 3. The Ideal of Pure Reason.

Section 1. On the ideal in general.

We saw above that through pure concepts of the understanding, apart from all conditions of sensibility, no objects whatsoever can be represented, because the conditions for their objective reality are lacking, and nothing but the mere form of thinking is met with in them. Nonetheless they admit of being exhibited in concreto once one applies them to appearances; for it is in these that they properly find their material for the concept of experience, which is itself nothing but a concept of the understanding taken in concreto. Ideas, though, lie at a still greater remove from objective reality than the categories do; for there is no appearance to be met with wherein they could be exhibited in concreto. They embrace a completeness of a certain sort, one that no empirical cognition that is possible can ever attain, and here reason has in mind nothing but a systematic unity, to which it seeks to approximate the empirically possible unity without ever quite reaching it.

Yet still farther removed from objective reality than the idea seems to be that which I call the ideal, and under which I take the idea to hold not only in concreto but indeed in individuo — that is, as a single thing determinable, or even determined, through the idea alone.

Humanity in its entire perfection comprises not merely the enlargement of every essential property attaching to this nature — the properties that make up our concept of it — as far as full agreement with its ends, this being what our idea of perfected humanity would amount to, but likewise all that, over and above this concept, pertains to the idea's thoroughgoing determination; for of every pair of opposed predicates only one alone can, in the end, befit the idea of the most perfect human being. What is an ideal for us was for Plato an idea of the divine understanding, a single object within the pure intuition of that understanding, the most perfect specimen of every kind of possible being and the original ground of all copies in appearance.

Without soaring quite so high, however, we must concede that human reason harbors ideals no less than ideas — ideals that, while devoid of the creative force of the Platonic ones, do wield practical force (as regulative principles) and underlie the possibility that certain actions attain their perfection. Moral concepts are not wholly pure concepts of reason, because something empirical (pleasure or displeasure) underlies them. Even so, with regard to the principle by which reason sets bounds to a freedom that is in itself lawless (that is, when one attends merely to their form), they may perfectly well serve as instances of pure concepts of reason. Virtue, and human wisdom together with it, taken in their full purity, are ideas. The sage of the Stoic, by contrast, is an ideal, that is, a human being existing merely in thought yet corresponding entirely to the idea of wisdom. Just as the idea furnishes the rule, so in such an instance the ideal serves as the archetype by which the copy is determined throughout; and we hold no other yardstick for our deeds than the bearing of this divine human being within us, with whom we compare and assess ourselves and thereby grow better, even though we can never attain it. These ideals, granted that one may be reluctant to concede them objective reality (existence), are nonetheless not to be dismissed as figments of the brain; on the contrary, they yield an indispensable standard for reason, which stands in need of a concept of what is, in its own kind, entirely complete, so as to assess and measure out, by that standard, the degree and the defects of the incomplete. But to want to realize the ideal in an example, that is, in appearance — as, say, the sage in a novel — is impracticable and has, moreover, something absurd and little edifying about it, since the natural limits that continually impair the completeness in the idea render all illusion in such an attempt impossible and thereby make even the good that lies in the idea suspect and akin to a mere fabrication.

Such is the case with the ideal of reason, which must at all times rest on determinate concepts and serve as the rule and archetype, whether of compliance or of assessment. Matters stand quite otherwise with the creatures of the imagination, about which no one can give an account or offer any intelligible concept — monograms, as it were, that are only scattered features, determined by no assignable rule, features that make up rather a sketch hovering, so to speak, amid the mean of diverse experiences than any determinate image, of the sort that painters and physiognomists claim to carry in their heads, and which are meant to be an uncommunicable shadow-image of what they produce, or indeed of what they appraise. One might, albeit only loosely, term them ideals of sensibility, since they are meant to serve as the unreachable pattern for possible empirical intuitions while nonetheless supplying no rule susceptible of explication or testing.

Reason's intent in its ideal, on the other hand, is thoroughgoing determination according to rules a priori; and so it frames for itself an object supposed to be wholly determinable on the basis of principles, even where the conditions adequate for this are missing in experience, so that the concept itself turns out transcendent.

Section 2. On the transcendental ideal (Prototypon transcendentale).

As regards whatever it does not itself contain, every concept remains undetermined, and it falls under the principle of determinability: namely, that of any two predicates contradictorily opposed to each other, only one can attach to it—a principle that follows from the law of contradiction and is therefore purely logical, one that sets aside all content of cognition and attends to nothing beyond the logical form of that cognition.

Every thing, however, considered in respect of its possibility, is subject besides to the principle of exhaustive determination, whereby, among all possible predicates of things—so far as these are set against their contraries —one must attach to it. This does not rest on the law of contradiction alone; for, beyond the relation between two conflicting predicates, it regards each thing further in relation to the whole of possibility, taken as the aggregate of all predicates of things as such, and, since it presupposes this as an a priori condition, it exhibits every thing as drawing its own possibility from the share it holds in that entire possibility.⁵⁹ The principle of exhaustive determination therefore bears on the content, not on the logical form alone. It is the principle governing the synthesis of all those predicates that are to constitute a thing's complete concept, rather than the merely analytic representation given through one of a pair of opposed predicates; and it carries a transcendental presupposition with it, namely that of the matter for all possibility, which is to hold a priori the data for each thing's particular possibility.

The proposition everything existing is exhaustively determined asserts not only that, of every pair of given predicates opposed to one another, but also of all possible predicates, one always attaches to it; through this proposition the predicates are not just set in logical relation among themselves, but the thing itself is placed in transcendental comparison with the aggregate of all possible predicates. It means as much as this: to have complete cognition of a thing, one must cognize everything possible and, by that means, determine the thing either affirmatively or negatively. Exhaustive determination is on this account a concept that we are never able to present in concreto in the whole of its totality, and it accordingly rests upon an idea seated exclusively in reason, which lays down for the understanding the rule for its complete employment.

Now even though this idea of the aggregate of all possibility—insofar as it underlies, as its condition, the exhaustive determination of every thing—still remains itself undetermined as to the predicates that might make it up, so that through it we think nothing more than an aggregate of all possible predicates taken generally, we do nonetheless discover, on closer scrutiny, that this idea, as the primordial concept, casts out a multitude of predicates that stand already given as derived from others, or that cannot coexist alongside one another, and that it clarifies itself up to a concept determined throughout a priori, thereby coming to be the concept of a single object that the mere idea exhaustively determines, and which must therefore be called an ideal of pure reason.

When we weigh all possible predicates not just logically but transcendentally—that is, in terms of the content thinkable in them a priori—we discover that some of them represent a being and others a bare non-being. Logical negation, marked out merely by the little word 'not', never in truth belongs to a concept as such, but only to the concept's relation to another within a judgment, and so it falls far short of being adequate to designate a concept in respect of its content. The term not-mortal can in no way convey that thereby a bare non-being of the object is represented; it leaves the entire content undisturbed. A transcendental negation, by contrast, denotes non-being in itself, and to it there stands opposed transcendental affirmation, which is a something whose very concept already expresses a being and is on that account termed reality (thinghood), since through it alone, and to the extent it reaches, objects are something (things), whereas the negation opposed to it denotes a mere deficiency, and, where it alone is thought, the cancellation of every thing is what gets represented.

Now no one is able to think a determinate negation without laying the opposed affirmation at its basis. Someone born blind cannot frame even the faintest representation of darkness, since he has none of light; the savage none of poverty, since he is unacquainted with prosperity.⁶⁰ One who is ignorant possesses no concept of his own ignorance, since he possesses none of science, and so forth. Hence the concepts of negations are, all of them, derived as well, while the realities furnish the data and, so to say, the matter—the transcendental content—for the possibility and exhaustive determination of all things.

If, accordingly, the exhaustive determination in our reason is founded upon a transcendental substratum—one holding, so to speak, the entire stock of stuff from which every possible predicate of things may be drawn—then that substratum is none other than the idea of a totality of reality (omnitudo realitatis). All genuine negations are, on that footing, nothing beyond limits—a name they could not bear unless the unlimited (the All) lay at their basis.

Moreover, by this complete possession of reality the concept of a thing in itself is likewise represented as exhaustively determined, and the concept of an entis realissimi amounts to the concept of an individual being, since out of all the mutually opposed predicates that are possible, one—precisely the one belonging to being outright—is met with in its determination. It is therefore a transcendental ideal underlying that exhaustive determination which is met with necessarily in whatever exists, and forming the highest and complete material condition of its possibility—the condition to which, in respect of their content, all thinking of objects whatever must be led back. It is, besides, the sole ideal proper to which human reason can attain, for in this one case alone a concept that is in itself universal, applying to a thing, is by its own means exhaustively determined and is recognized as the representation of an individual.

Reason's logical determining of a concept proceeds by way of a disjunctive inference, whose major premise sets out a logical division (namely the partitioning of the sphere of a universal concept) , whose minor premise confines that sphere to a single part, and whose conclusion thereby fixes the concept. A universal concept of reality as such admits of no a priori division, since apart from experience we are acquainted with no determinate species of reality that would fall under that genus. The transcendental major premise of the exhaustive determination of all things is on this account nothing else than the representation of the aggregate of all reality—not a concept that merely holds all predicates, by their transcendental content, beneath itself, but one that embraces them within itself; and the exhaustive determination of any given thing depends upon a limiting of this All of reality, whereby a part of it is assigned to the thing and the remainder shut out, which accords with the disjunctive major premise's either/or and with the determining of the object by one of the members of that partition in the minor premise. Consequently, the way reason employs itself when it makes the transcendental ideal the ground of its determining of all possible things runs parallel to the way it proceeds within disjunctive inferences; and this was just the proposition I set out above as the ground for the systematic division of all transcendental ideas, on which basis these are produced in parallel with, and corresponding to, the three kinds of inference of reason.

It goes without saying that reason, for the purpose here in view—namely, simply to represent to itself the necessary exhaustive determination of things—does not presuppose the existence of a being answering to the ideal , but only the idea of such a being, so as to trace, from an unconditioned totality of exhaustive determination, the conditioned one—namely, that of what is limited. For reason, then, the ideal is the archetype (Prototypon) of all things, which collectively, as defective copies (ectypa), draw from it the stuff of their possibility and, coming nearer to it in greater or lesser degree, yet at all times fall short of reaching it by an infinite distance.

In this way the entire possibility of things (of the synthesis of the manifold with respect to its content) is looked upon as derived, and only the possibility of that which encloses all reality within itself is looked upon as original. For all negations (which are, after all, the sole predicates whereby everything else may be marked off from the supremely real being) amount to nothing but restrictions of a greater reality and, in the end, of the supreme reality; they thus presuppose it and, in respect of content, are merely derived from it. The whole manifold of things is but so many correspondingly manifold ways of restricting the concept of the supreme reality, which serves as their common substratum, in the same manner that every figure is possible only as a distinct way of restricting infinite space. For this reason the object of reason's ideal, an object residing solely within reason, is likewise named the original being (ens originarium); insofar as nothing stands above it, the supreme being (ens summum); and insofar as everything else, being conditioned, ranks beneath it, the being of all beings (ens entium). Yet all of this designates, not the objective relation of an actual object to other things, but that of the idea to concepts, and it leaves us wholly in the dark concerning the existence of a being of such surpassing distinction.

And since one likewise cannot say that an original being is composed of many derived beings—each of these presupposing it and hence unable to constitute it—the ideal of the original being will have to be conceived as simple as well.

Strictly put, then, the deriving of every other possibility from this original being cannot be viewed as a restriction of its supreme reality, nor, so to speak, as a partitioning of that reality; for in that event the original being would come to be viewed as a mere aggregate of derived beings, and this, by what precedes, is impossible—however much, at the very start, in a first rough silhouette, we did picture it so. It would be more accurate to say that the supreme reality underlies the possibility of all things as a ground rather than as an aggregate, and that the manifoldness of those things rests, not on any restriction of the original being itself, but on its full sequel—to which our whole sensibility, along with all reality in appearance, would then belong, though such reality cannot belong, as an ingredient, to the idea of the supreme being.

Should we now press this idea of ours yet further, hypostatizing it, we shall find ourselves able, by means of the bare concept of the supreme reality, to determine the original being as unique, simple, all-sufficient, eternal, and so on—in short, to fix it, in its unconditioned completeness, through all the predicaments. The concept of a being of this kind is the concept of God as thought in a transcendental sense; and so the ideal of pure reason forms the object of a transcendental theology, exactly as I noted above as well.

This employment of the transcendental idea would, even so, already transgress the bounds of its determination and permissibility. For reason had laid it down, merely as the concept of all reality, at the basis of the exhaustive determination of things as such, without requiring that all this reality be given objectively and itself make up a thing. This last is nothing but a figment, whereby we draw together and give reality to the manifold of our idea within an ideal, as though in a particular being—a thing we have no title to do, not even so much as to admit outright the possibility of such a hypothesis; just as, moreover, whatever conclusions issue from an ideal of the kind have nothing to do with, and exert not the least influence on, the exhaustive determination of things at large, for whose sake alone the idea was ever required.

Describing the procedure of our reason together with its dialectic does not suffice; one has, in addition, to try to uncover the sources from which it springs, so that this semblance may itself be accounted for, in the manner of a phenomenon of the understanding; for the ideal we are discussing rests upon a natural idea, and not a merely arbitrary one. Hence I raise the question: what leads reason to look upon all possibility of things as derived from one single possibility lying at the basis—that of the supreme reality—and then to presuppose this as contained within a particular original being?

The answer presents itself unbidden out of what was transacted in the transcendental analytic. The possibility of objects of the senses consists in a relation of those objects to our thinking, wherein something (that is, the empirical form) admits of being thought a priori, while that which makes up the matter—the reality within appearance (answering to sensation)—has to be given, in default of which the object could not so much as be thought and its possibility, accordingly, could not be represented. Now an object of the senses allows of exhaustive determination only when it is held up against all the predicates of appearance and, through them, represented affirmatively or negatively. But since that which makes up the thing itself (within appearance)—the real, that is—must be given therein, in default of which it could not be thought at all, while that wherein the real of all appearances is given is the single all-embracing experience, it follows that the matter for the possibility of all objects of the senses has to be presupposed as given within one aggregate, upon whose limiting alone the whole possibility of empirical objects, their mutual difference, and their exhaustive determination can be founded. Now in point of fact no objects other than those of the senses can be given to us, and given nowhere save within the setting of a possible experience; nothing, in consequence, counts as an object for us unless it presupposes the aggregate of all empirical reality as the condition of its possibility. By force of a natural illusion we come to regard as a principle valid for all things whatever what in truth holds good only of those given as objects of our senses. In consequence, by striking out this restriction, we shall take the empirical principle underlying our concepts of how things are possible as appearances to be a transcendental principle of the possibility of things in general.

That we go on, afterwards, to hypostasize this idea of the aggregate of all reality comes about because we dialectically convert the distributive unity belonging to the understanding's use in experience into the collective unity of one experiential whole, and, within this whole of appearance, imagine to ourselves a single thing holding all empirical reality within it, which thing, by way of the transcendental subreption already spoken of, then gets mistaken for the concept of a thing positioned at the pinnacle of the possibility of all things—furnishing, for their exhaustive determination, the real conditions.⁶¹

Section 3. On the arguments of speculative reason in inferring the existence of a supreme being.

Despite this pressing need of reason to presuppose something capable of serving the understanding as the full basis underlying the thoroughgoing determination of its concepts, reason still remarks the ideal and merely fabricated character of such a presupposition far too readily to let itself be talked, on that ground alone, into straightaway accepting a mere self-made product of its own thinking as an actual being — unless it were driven by something else to seek, somewhere, its point of rest in the regressus that leads from the conditioned (which is given) up to the unconditioned — a thing that, considered in itself and according to its bare concept, is indeed not given as actual, yet which alone can bring to completion the series of conditions traced out to their grounds. Such is the natural path that every human reason travels, even the most vulgar, although not every one endures to the end of it. It sets out not from concepts but from ordinary experience, and thereby places something existing at its base. This soil, however, sinks away unless it is supported by the unshakable rock of the absolutely necessary. And this rock itself hovers without support if there is still empty space beside and beneath it, and if it does not itself fill everything, leaving no further room for any why — in other words, unless it is infinite as regards reality.

If anything whatsoever exists, be it what it may, then one must likewise grant that something necessarily exists. For whatever is contingent exists only on the condition of something else serving as its cause, and from that cause the inference runs on further until it arrives at a cause that is not contingent and, just for that reason, is there necessarily and without any condition. That is the argument by which reason underpins its advance to an original being.

Reason now casts about for the concept of a being fit for such a prerogative of existence as unconditioned necessity is, not so much in order thereupon to infer that being's existence a priori from its concept (for had it the boldness to do so, it might conduct its inquiry solely among bare concepts and would not need to lay any given existence at the base), but solely so as to locate, among all concepts of possible things, that one which harbors nothing at odds with absolute necessity. For that something absolutely necessary must after all exist it already regards as settled by the earlier inference. If, then, it is able to remove everything that will not square with this necessity save a single thing, then that thing is the absolutely necessary being — whether or not one can grasp its necessity, that is, derive it from its concept alone.

Now that thing whose concept contains within it the "because" answering to every "why", which is defective in no part and in no respect, and which everywhere suffices as a condition, seems on precisely this account to be the being that fits absolute necessity, since, holding of itself all the conditions for everything possible, it stands in need of no condition of its own — is indeed not even susceptible of one — and hence satisfies the concept of unconditioned necessity in at least one part, wherein no other concept can equal it, since such a concept, being deficient and standing in need of completion, exhibits in itself no such mark of independence from all further conditions. It is true that from this one still cannot yet safely conclude that whatever fails to contain within it the highest condition, complete in every regard, must therefore itself be conditioned as to its existence; but it does after all lack in itself that one distinguishing mark of unconditioned existence which reason has at its command for cognizing any being as unconditioned through an a priori concept.

The concept of a being possessing the highest reality would therefore, among all concepts of possible things, be the one that fits best the concept of an unconditionally necessary being; and even though it does not entirely satisfy the latter, we nonetheless have no choice, but see ourselves constrained to cling to it, since we dare not cast to the winds the existence of a necessary being, and yet, granting it, are unable to find anything in the entire field of possibility that could put forward a better-grounded claim to such a prerogative in existence.

The natural path of human reason, then, is fashioned as follows. To begin with, it satisfies itself that some necessary being exists. In such a being it cognizes an unconditioned existence. It then seeks the concept of what is independent of every condition, and it finds this in that which is itself the sufficient condition of all else — that is, in what contains all reality. But the unlimited all amounts to absolute unity, and it brings with it the concept of a single, namely the supreme, being; and so reason infers that the supreme being, being the primordial ground of all things, is there absolutely and of necessity.

A certain solidity cannot be disputed to this concept when what is at issue is resolutions — that is, once one has conceded the existence of some necessary being and settled that one must commit to a position on where to place it; for then one can make no more fitting choice, or rather one has no choice whatever, but is constrained to give one's vote to the absolute unity of complete reality, taken as the primordial wellspring of possibility. But if nothing impels us to a resolution, and we would rather leave this whole affair undecided until the full weight of the proofs forces our assent — that is, if the concern is merely the assessment of how much we know of this task and how much we only fancy ourselves to know — then the foregoing inference appears in a far less advantageous shape and requires favor to make good the deficiency of its rightful claims.

For even supposing we allow everything to pass just as favorably as it here lies before us — namely, first, that from some given existence (at most also merely my own) a valid inference to an unconditionally necessary being's existence takes place; and second, that I am bound to regard a being which contains all reality, and thus every condition as well, as absolutely unconditioned, so that the concept of the thing that answers to absolute necessity is thereby found — it still in no way follows from this that the concept of a restricted being — one lacking the highest reality — is on that account in conflict with absolute necessity. For even though in its concept I do not meet with the unconditioned that already brings with it the totality of conditions, it still by no means follows from this that its existence must for just that reason be conditioned; any more than, in a hypothetical inference of reason, I may say: where a certain condition (here, that of completeness according to concepts) is lacking, there too the conditioned is lacking. Rather, it will remain open to us to let all the remaining restricted beings count just as much as unconditionally necessary, notwithstanding that we cannot derive their necessity from the general concept we have of them. In this manner, however, this argument would have supplied us with not even the least concept of what properties a necessary being possesses, and would have achieved nothing at all.

Even so, there clings to this argument a certain weight and a prestige of which it cannot at once be deprived on account of this objective inadequacy. For assume there are obligations perfectly correct in the idea of reason, yet lacking all reality of application to ourselves — that is, without incentives — in the absence of a presupposed supreme being that could impart force and weight to the practical laws: then we too would be under an obligation to follow those concepts which, granting they may not be objectively sufficient, still outweigh the rest by the standard of our reason, compared with which we know nothing better or more compelling. Here the duty to choose would, through a practical addition, tip the irresolution of speculation out of its equilibrium; indeed reason, before its own bench as the most indulgent of judges, would find no justification if, under pressing motives — however defective its insight — it had not followed these grounds of its judgment, of which we at any rate know none more reliable.

Though this argument is in fact transcendental, resting as it does on the inner inadequacy of what is contingent, it is nevertheless so plain and natural that it suits the most ordinary human sense the moment it is once brought to it. One sees things alter, arise and perish; they, then, or at least their state, must have a cause. But of every cause that may ever be given in experience this very same thing can again be asked. Now where should we more justly place the supreme causality than where the highest causality likewise resides — that is, in that being which originally holds within itself the sufficiency for every possible effect, and whose concept, moreover, comes about very readily through the single stroke of an all-embracing perfection. This highest cause we then take to be absolutely necessary, since we find it flatly necessary to climb up to it, and find no ground to pass on still further beyond it. Hence it is that among all peoples we see some sparks of monotheism glimmer through even the blindest polytheism — a thing to which not reflection and profound speculation, but only a gradually intelligible natural course of the common understanding, has led.

Only three ways of proving God's existence out of speculative reason are possible.

Every route one might strike out on toward this end either sets out from determinate experience and from the particular constitution of our sensible world cognized by means of it, ascending from there, by laws of causality, to a highest cause lying outside the world; or it lays only indeterminate experience, that is, some existence or other, empirically at the base; or, finally, abstracting from all experience whatever, it concludes, entirely a priori, to the existence of a highest cause out of mere concepts. The first of these is the physico-theological proof, the second the cosmological, and the third the ontological. There are no more of them than this, nor can there be more.

I shall make it evident that reason achieves just as little by the one route (the empirical) as by the other (the transcendental), and that it unfurls its wings to no purpose when it seeks to rise above the sensible world by the mere might of speculation. As concerns the order in which these kinds of proof must be laid before examination, it will be exactly the reverse of the one that reason, in gradually widening itself, takes, and in which we too have presented them at the outset. For it will emerge that, although experience furnishes the first occasion for it, it is the transcendental concept alone that steers reason in this striving of its and stakes out, in all such attempts, the goal it has set before itself. I shall accordingly start with the examination of the transcendental proof, and afterward observe what the empirical, added on, might contribute toward enlarging its probative force.

Section 4. On the impossibility of an ontological proof of the existence of God.

From what has already been said one sees readily: the concept of an absolutely necessary being constitutes a pure concept of reason — that is, a mere idea — whose objective reality is far from established by reason's having need of it, an idea which also merely points the way toward a certain, albeit unreachable, completeness, and which in truth serves rather to circumscribe the understanding than to enlarge its reach toward new objects. Here we now come upon what is odd and paradoxical: that the inference from some given existence in general to an existence that is absolutely necessary appears at once pressing and correct, and that all the conditions the understanding requires for framing a concept of such a necessity nonetheless stand wholly against us.

At all times people have talked of the absolutely necessary being, and have labored not so much to understand whether and in what way a thing of this kind can even be thought, as rather to prove its existence. A nominal definition of this concept is admittedly quite easy: it is, namely, something whose non-being is impossible; but this makes one no wiser about the conditions that render it impossible to view the non-being of a thing as downright unthinkable, conditions which are in fact the very thing one wishes to know, namely whether by this concept anything whatsoever is being thought or not. For to discard, by means of the word unconditioned, every condition that the understanding invariably needs in order to view something as necessary is far from making it intelligible to me whether, by a concept of an unconditionally necessary thing, I then still think something or perhaps nothing whatever.

More than this: this concept — hazarded at sheer random and by now grown thoroughly familiar — has furthermore been believed to be explained by a mass of examples, so that any further asking after its intelligibility has appeared entirely superfluous. Every proposition of geometry, for example that a triangle has three angles, holds with absolute necessity; and in this way people talked about an object lying entirely beyond the sphere of our understanding as though they grasped quite well what they meant to say by their concept of it.

The alleged examples are, every one of them, drawn from judgments alone, but not from things and their existence. The unconditioned necessity of judgments, however, is no absolute necessity of things. For the judgment's absolute necessity is nothing but a conditioned necessity of the thing, or of the predicate within the judgment. The proposition above did not assert that three angles are absolutely necessary; it said rather that, on condition that a triangle is there (is given), three angles too are there (in it) of necessity. All the same, this logical necessity has shown so great a power of illusion that, once one had formed a concept a priori of a thing, so framed that in one's own opinion existence fell within its compass, one believed oneself able to conclude with assurance: because existence necessarily attaches to the object of this concept — that is, on condition that I posit this thing as something given (as existing), its existence too is posited necessarily (by the rule of identity) — this being is therefore itself absolutely necessary, since its existence is thought along in a concept adopted at pleasure and on condition that its object is posited.

If, in an identical judgment, I remove the predicate and retain the subject, a contradiction springs up, and hence I say: the former belongs of necessity to the latter. But if I remove the subject along with the predicate, no contradiction springs up; for there is nothing left over to which a contradiction could attach. Positing a triangle while removing its three angles is contradictory; but removing the triangle along with its three angles involves no contradiction. Matters stand in just the same way regarding the concept of an absolutely necessary being. Should you remove its existence, you remove the thing itself together with every one of its predicates; from where, then, is the contradiction supposed to arise? Externally there is nothing left that would be contradicted, since the thing is not meant to be necessary externally; nor is there anything internally, since in removing the thing itself you have removed everything internal along with it. God is almighty; the judgment is a necessary one. Omnipotence cannot be removed so long as you posit a deity — that is, an infinite being — with whose concept the former is identical. But should you say: God is not, neither omnipotence nor any one of his other predicates is then given; for all of them have been removed along with the subject, and this thought exhibits not the slightest contradiction.

You have seen, then, that when I remove the predicate of a judgment together with its subject, no internal contradiction can ever spring up, be the predicate what it may. Now the only evasion left to you is to say: there are subjects that admit of no removal at all, and that must therefore remain. But that would be to say as much as: there are absolutely necessary subjects; a presupposition whose correctness is exactly what I have been doubting, and whose possibility it was that you meant to show me. For of a thing which, were it removed with all its predicates, would leave behind a contradiction, I can frame not the slightest concept; and without the contradiction I have, through nothing but pure concepts a priori, no mark whatever of impossibility.

In the face of every one of these general inferences (which nobody can refuse) you summon me with one case, put forward by you as a proof by deed: that there is after all one concept — indeed only this single one — whose object's non-being or removal is contradictory in itself; and it is the concept of the most real of all beings. It possesses, you say, all reality, and you are justified in assuming such a being to be possible (which I concede for the present, though a concept that does not contradict itself is a long way from demonstrating the possibility of its object).⁶² Now among all reality existence too is included: hence existence lies within the concept of a possible thing. Now if this thing is removed, the internal possibility of the thing has been removed, which is contradictory.

I reply: you have committed a contradiction already if, into the concept of a thing that you wished to think solely as to its possibility, you have brought — under whatever disguised name — the concept of its existence. Grant you this, and to all appearances you have won the game, though in fact you have said nothing; for what you have committed is a bare tautology. I put the question to you: is the proposition, this thing or that (which I allow you as possible, be it what it may) exists; is, I say, this proposition an analytic one or a synthetic? If it is the former, then the thing's existence contributes nothing to your thought of it; but in that case either the thought present in you would have to be the very thing itself, or else you have taken an existence for granted as belonging to possibility, and have then, as you allege, inferred the existence from the internal possibility — which is nothing but a wretched tautology. The word: reality, which rings differently in the concept of the thing than existence does in the predicate's concept, does not decide the matter. For even if you give the name reality to every act of positing (leaving undetermined what it is you posit), still you have already posited the thing with all of its predicates in the subject's concept and assumed it to be actual, and in the predicate you merely repeat it. If you concede instead, as every reasonable person must in all fairness concede, that every existential proposition is synthetic: how then would you maintain that the predicate of existence admits of no removal without contradiction? since that advantage attaches distinctively to analytic propositions alone, whose character rests on just this.

I would indeed hope to demolish this over-subtle argumentation without any roundabout course, through an exact determination of the concept of existence, had I not found that the illusion that comes of mistaking a logical predicate for a real predicate (that is, for a determination of a thing) turns away nearly every attempt at instruction. As a logical predicate anything whatever may serve, even the subject may be predicated of itself; logic, after all, abstracts from every content. A determination, by contrast, is a predicate that comes in over and above the subject's concept and enlarges it. It must therefore not be contained in that concept already.

Being is evidently no real predicate, that is, no concept of something that could be added onto the concept of a thing. It is just the position of a thing, or of certain determinations, taken in themselves. In logical use it is nothing but the copula in a judgment. The proposition: God is almighty, contains two concepts that have their objects: God and omnipotence; the small word: is, is not some further predicate on top, but merely that which sets the predicate in its relation to the subject. If I now take the subject (God) together with all of its predicates (omnipotence being among them) and say: God is, or that there is a God, then I posit no new predicate for the concept of God, but only the subject in itself together with all of its predicates — and indeed the object in relation to my concept. The two must have exactly the same content, and hence nothing further can accrue to the concept — which expresses the mere possibility — from my thinking its object as absolutely given (through the expression: it is). And thus the actual holds no more within it than the merely possible. A hundred actual thalers contain nothing in the least beyond a hundred possible ones. For since the possible thalers signify the concept while the actual ones signify the object and its position in itself, my concept — in case the object contained more than the concept — would not then express the object entire, and so would not be the appropriate concept of it either. In the state of my finances, however, there is more with a hundred actual thalers than with their mere concept (that is, with their possibility). For given actuality, the object is not merely contained in my concept analytically, but is joined synthetically to my concept (itself a determination of my state), without these hundred thalers, as merely thought, being augmented in the slightest by this being outside my concept.

If, accordingly, I think a thing by means of whatever predicates I please, and by however many (even in its thoroughgoing determination), then my adding besides: this thing is, brings not the slightest addition to the thing . For otherwise not the very same thing, but more than I had thought in the concept, would exist, and I could not say that it is precisely the object of my concept that exists. Even should I think every reality but one in some thing, the missing reality does not get added by my saying: so defective a thing exists; rather, the thing exists saddled with just the same defect with which I thought it, or else something other than what I had thought would exist. Should I now think a being as the highest reality (without any defect), the question still stands whether it exists or not. For though nothing whatever is lacking in my concept of a thing's possible real content in general, something is still lacking in its relation to the entire state of my thinking — namely, that cognition of that object should be possible a posteriori as well. And here the source of the difficulty at work in this matter also comes to light. Were an object of the senses at issue, I would be unable to mistake the thing's existence for the bare concept of the thing. For through the concept the object is thought merely as according with the general conditions of a possible empirical cognition as such, whereas through existence it is thought as contained within the context of the whole of experience; through this linkage with the content of the whole of experience, the object's concept is not enlarged in the least, while our thinking gains by it one further possible perception. If, by contrast, we would think existence through the pure category alone, no wonder we can name no mark by which to tell it apart from mere possibility.

Let our concept of an object, then, contain what and as much as it will; we must still step outside the concept in order to bestow existence upon the object. With objects of the senses this comes about through their connection with one or another of my perceptions according to empirical laws; whereas for objects of pure thinking there exists no means at all of cognizing their existence, since it would have to be cognized wholly a priori; our consciousness of any existence, however (whether immediate, by way of perception, or mediated by inferences that tie something to perception), belongs wholly and entirely to the unity of experience; and while an existence beyond this field cannot be pronounced downright impossible, it is a presupposition that we lack any means to justify.

The concept of a highest being is an idea very useful in many a respect; but just because it is mere idea, it is wholly unable, by means of itself alone, to broaden our cognition with regard to what exists. It cannot manage even so much as to instruct us about the possibility of anything further. The analytic mark of possibility, consisting in this, that bare positions (realities) generate no contradiction, cannot indeed be denied it; but since the linking of all real properties within one thing is a synthesis on whose possibility no a priori judgment is open to us — the realities not being given to us in their specific character, and, even were that to happen, no judging at all taking place there, because for synthetic cognitions the mark of possibility must always be looked for in experience alone, to which, though, an idea's object can never belong — the celebrated Leibniz came nowhere near accomplishing what he flattered himself he had, namely, achieving a priori insight into the possibility of so lofty an ideal being.

On the celebrated ontological (Cartesian) proof, then, which would derive a highest being's existence from concepts, all pains and labor are spent in vain; and a human being might as little grow richer in insight from bare ideas as a merchant grows in wealth were he minded, in order to better his circumstances, to hang some zeros onto his cash balance.

5. Section. On the impossibility of a cosmological proof of the existence of God.

It was a thoroughly unnatural procedure, and nothing but a novelty of the schoolmen's ingenuity, to try to pick out, from an idea sketched altogether at will, the existence of the corresponding object itself. In fact this route would never have been tried had it not been preceded by our reason's need to posit, for existence as such, something necessary (a point at which the ascent might come to rest), and had reason not found itself forced—given that such necessity has to be unconditioned and certain a priori—to look for a concept capable, if it could be managed, of meeting that requirement and of making an existence something cognized entirely a priori. This concept, now, one supposed oneself to discover in the idea of a being most real of all, and thus that idea came to serve merely as a more precise acquaintance with what one was, on independent grounds, already convinced or talked into holding must exist—that is, with the necessary being. This natural progression of reason was, however, kept out of sight, and rather than terminating in the concept, one set about starting from it, so as to draw out of it the necessity of existence that the concept was in truth appointed merely to round out. And so there arose that miscarried ontological proof, which offers nothing to satisfy either sound and natural understanding or a properly scholastic scrutiny.

The cosmological proof, which is now to occupy us, keeps intact the linkage of absolute necessity with supreme reality; but rather than reasoning, as the earlier one did, from supreme reality to necessity in existence, it reasons instead from the antecedently granted unconditioned necessity of some being or other to the unbounded reality of that being, and to this extent it at least steers everything onto the rails of a mode of inference that is—I cannot tell whether reasonable or merely reason-aping, but at all events natural—and that carries the most persuasion for the common understanding no less than for the speculative; just as it plainly sketches the opening contours of every proof in natural theology, contours that have been traced in every age and will be traced hereafter, however lavishly one may care to trim and conceal them beneath foliage and curlicues. This proof, to which Leibniz likewise gave the name a contingentia mundi, we shall now set before us and put to the test.

Its wording is this: if anything at all exists, then a downright necessary being must exist as well. Now, at the very least, I myself exist: hence there exists an absolutely necessary being. The minor premise contains an experience, the major the inference, from an experience in general, to the existence of the necessary.⁶³ So the proof genuinely takes its start from experience, and is therefore not carried through wholly a priori, or ontologically; and since it is the world that we call the object of all possible experience, the proof is on that score labeled the cosmological one. And because it likewise abstracts from every special property of the objects of experience through which this world might differ from any other possible one: its very designation already marks it off, too, from the physico-theological proof, which presses observations of the peculiar makeup of this sensible world of ours into service as grounds of proof.

The proof presses on: the necessary being admits of determination in only one manner, i.e., with regard to all possible opposed predicates only through one of them, and so must be, through and through, determined by its concept. Now, of a thing there is but a single possible concept determining it a priori all the way through—namely, that of the entis realissimi. The concept of the being most real of all is therefore the sole one by means of which a necessary being can be thought—that is, a supreme being exists of necessity.

So many ratiocinative principles converge in this cosmological argument that speculative reason looks here to have mustered the whole of its dialectical artistry so as to produce the largest transcendental semblance it can. Let us, though, lay its assessment aside for a while, simply to bring to light one of its tricks, whereby it puts forward an old argument, dressed up, as if new, and invokes the agreement of two witnesses—one a witness of pure reason, the other of empirical warrant—whereas really it is the first alone that has merely swapped its coat and its voice in order to pass for a second. To make its foundation really secure, this proof plants itself on experience and thereby assumes the look of differing from the ontological proof, which stakes its entire confidence on nothing but pure concepts a priori. Yet the cosmological proof draws on this experience for one single step only, namely the step to the existence of a necessary being as such. Which properties it may possess is something the empirical ground of proof is unable to teach; at that juncture reason parts company with it altogether and probes behind sheer concepts: namely, which properties an absolutely necessary being as such would have to possess—that is, which among all possible things holds within it the conditions required (requisita) for an absolute necessity. Now she fancies she encounters these requisites in the concept of a being most real of all, and there alone, and thereupon concludes: this is the downright necessary being. But plainly one is here taking for granted that the concept of a being of supreme reality does full justice to the concept of absolute necessity in existence—that is, that the one lets us infer the other; a claim the ontological argument put forward, and which one accordingly embraces and makes the basis in the cosmological proof, notwithstanding that one had wished to steer clear of it. For absolute necessity is existence out of bare concepts. If I now assert: the concept of the entis realissimi is a concept of that sort, and indeed the only one suited and adequate to necessary existence, then I am bound to concede as well that from it the latter may be inferred. It is therefore, strictly, the ontological proof alone—drawn from bare concepts—that holds all the probative force within the so-called cosmological one; and the purported experience does no work at all, serving perhaps only to conduct us to the concept of absolute necessity, but never to exhibit that necessity in some determinate thing. For the moment we make that our aim, we have straightaway to forsake all experience and hunt among pure concepts for whichever of them might hold the conditions of the possibility of an absolutely necessary being. But once, in this fashion, the mere possibility of such a being has been discerned, its existence too stands demonstrated; for that comes to the same as saying: among everything possible there is a single thing that brings absolute necessity along with it, i.e., this being exists downright necessarily.

Every piece of sleight-of-hand in inference is exposed most readily when one displays it in properly scholastic form. Here is one such display.

Should the proposition hold good—every simply necessary being is at once the being most real of all (this being the nervus probandi of the cosmological proof)—then, like all affirmative judgments, it must at least admit of conversion per accidens; and so: some beings most real of all are at once simply necessary beings. But now, since one ens realissimum differs in no point from another, whatever is true of some of the items falling under this concept is true likewise of all. Hence I shall (in the present case) be able to convert it without restriction as well, i.e., every being most real of all is a necessary being. And since this proposition stands settled a priori from its concepts alone, the naked concept of the being most real of all must itself bring along that being's absolute necessity too—the very thing the ontological proof maintained and the cosmological declined to own, yet all the same slipped, in covert fashion, beneath its inferences.

The second route, then, that speculative reason follows in order to establish the existence of the supreme being is not merely as fallacious as the first, but bears this additional fault, that it perpetrates an ignoratio elenchi, in that it holds out to us the promise of leading along a fresh footpath yet, after a brief roundabout, delivers us back onto the old one we had abandoned for its sake.

I remarked a moment ago that a whole nest of dialectical pretensions lies hidden in this cosmological argument, one that transcendental critique can readily uncover and demolish. Here I mean only to enumerate them, leaving it to the reader already in practice to pursue the fallacious principles further and to remove them.

Thus there is, for instance, 1) the transcendental principle of arguing from the contingent to a cause—a principle that carries weight only within the sensible world and, beyond it, does not so much as possess a sense. For the purely intellectual concept of the contingent can bring forth no synthetic proposition of the kind that causality is, and the principle of causality carries no significance and no token of its employment save within the sensible world alone; here, however, it was meant to do precisely the service of carrying us out past the sensible world . 2) The principle of concluding, from the impossibility, within the sensible world, of an infinite series of causes given one atop another, to a first cause—an inference the principles of reason's use do not license us to draw even within experience, still less permit us to stretch this principle out beyond experience (to which the chain admits of no prolongation whatever). 3) Reason's spurious complacency regarding the completion of this series, achieved by finally clearing away every condition—though without a condition no concept of a necessity can obtain—and then, since nothing further can be grasped, treating this as a completion of one's concept. 4) The conflation of the logical possibility of a concept comprising all reality combined (with no inner contradiction) with transcendental possibility, which stands in need of a principle of the feasibility of such a synthesis—a principle that, once more, can reach only into the domain of possible experiences, and so forth.

The whole trick of the cosmological proof is directed merely at dodging the proof, a priori and through bare concepts, of the existence of a necessary being—a proof that would have to proceed ontologically, something for which we feel ourselves wholly unequal. With that in view we argue, from an actual existence placed at the ground (an experience in general), as well as it can be managed, to some downright necessary condition of that existence. In that case we have no call to account for the possibility of this condition. For once it has been shown that it is there, the question of its possibility becomes wholly needless. Suppose now we want to pin down this necessary being more nearly as to its constitution; then we are not after that which suffices to make the necessity of existence comprehensible from its concept—for could we do so, no empirical premise would be called for; no, we are after nothing but the negative condition (conditio sine qua non), in the absence of which a being would fail to be absolutely necessary. In every other species of inference from a given consequence back to its ground this would proceed well enough; but the mischance here is that the condition demanded for absolute necessity can be encountered in one being only, which for that reason would have to embrace in its concept all that absolute necessity requires and so render possible an a priori inference to it; that is, I should have to be able to argue the reverse as well: to whatever thing this concept (of supreme reality) belongs, that thing is downright necessary; and if I cannot argue thus (as I must indeed confess if I mean to avoid the ontological proof), then on my new road too I have failed, and I find myself back at the point from which I departed. The concept of the supreme being does, to be sure, give a priori satisfaction to every question that can be raised about the inner determinations of a thing, and it is for that reason an ideal beyond compare, since the universal concept singles the same thing out at once as an individual among all possible things. It gives, however, no satisfaction whatever to the question about its own existence—the very thing that was really the point at issue—and to the query of someone who admitted the existence of a necessary being and merely wished to learn which among all things must be taken for it, no reply could be given: this one here is the necessary being.

One may perhaps be allowed to posit the existence of a being of the highest adequacy, as cause of all possible effects, in order to make easier for reason the unity of explanatory grounds that it is seeking. But to arrogate so much as even to declare: such a being exists necessarily, is no longer the unassuming voicing of an admissible hypothesis, but the impudent presumption of an apodictic certainty; for whatever one pretends to cognize as simply necessary must have a cognition that likewise brings absolute necessity along with it.

The entire problem of the transcendental ideal amounts to this: to locate either a concept to go with absolute necessity, or, given the concept of some thing, that thing's absolute necessity. If one succeeds at the one, one must succeed at the other as well; for reason cognizes as simply necessary only what is necessary from its concept. Yet both alike outrun entirely every last exertion to content our understanding on this head, and equally every endeavor to quiet it over this incapacity of its own.

The unconditioned necessity that we find so indispensably requisite as the ultimate support of all things is the genuine abyss of human reason. Eternity itself, for all the shudder-inducing sublimity with which a Haller might portray it, falls far short of the same vertiginous effect upon the mind; for it does no more than measure the duration of things—it does not uphold them. One can neither fend off the thought nor yet endure it, that a being we picture to ourselves as the very highest among all possible ones should, so to speak, address itself thus: I am from everlasting to everlasting, apart from me there is nothing save what is something solely through my will; but from where, then, do I come? At this point everything gives way beneath us, and the greatest perfection no less than the least dangles unsupported before merely speculative reason, to which it costs nothing to let the one vanish exactly like the other, without the least obstacle.

Many of nature's forces, which announce their existence through certain effects, stay unfathomable to us; for observation cannot track them far enough. The transcendental object at the base of the appearances, and along with it the reason why our sensibility carries these rather than other supreme conditions , are and stay unfathomable to us, even though the matter itself is in fact given—only not seen into. An ideal of pure reason, though, cannot be styled unfathomable, seeing that it has no other credential of its reality to display than reason's need to bring all synthetic unity to completion by its means. Since, accordingly, it is not so much as given as a thinkable object, neither is it unfathomable as one; rather, being a mere idea, it must find its abode and its dissolution within the nature of reason, and so must be capable of being fathomed; for in just this reason consists, that we can render account of all our concepts, opinions, and assertions—be it on objective grounds or, where they amount to mere semblance, on subjective ones.

Discovery and explanation of the dialectical illusion in all transcendental proofs of a necessary being's existence.

The two proofs conducted up to this point were both attempted transcendentally, that is, independently of empirical principles. For although the cosmological one takes an experience in general as its basis, it is nonetheless carried out not from any particular constitution of that experience but from pure principles of reason in relation to an existence furnished through empirical consciousness as such, and it goes so far as to forsake this guidance in order to rest on nothing but pure concepts. In these transcendental proofs, then, what gives rise to the dialectical—yet natural—illusion that ties together the concepts of necessity and of highest reality, and that turns into a real, hypostatized entity something which can, after all, be no more than an idea? What is the cause of the inevitability of assuming something among existing things to be necessary in itself and yet at the same time of recoiling from the existence of such a being as from an abyss; and how does one manage it so that reason may come to understand itself on this point and pass from the wavering condition of a timid assent, forever taken back again, to a settled insight?

It is something exceedingly remarkable that, once one presupposes that something exists, one cannot evade the inference that something also exists necessarily. The cosmological argument rested on this wholly natural (though not therefore reliable) inference. By contrast, whatever concept of a thing I may adopt, I discover that I can never represent its existence to myself as utterly necessary, and that nothing stops me—let whatever will exist—from thinking the non-being of that thing; hence, while I must indeed assume something necessary for the existing in general, I can nonetheless think no single thing as necessary in itself. That is to say: I can never complete the regress to the conditions of existing without assuming a necessary being; yet I can never begin from such a being.

If, for existing things in general, I am obliged to think something necessary, yet am not entitled to think any thing as necessary in itself, then it follows inevitably that necessity and contingency cannot pertain to and bear upon the things themselves, since otherwise a contradiction would arise; and hence that neither of these two principles is objective, but that they can at most be merely subjective principles of reason—namely, on the one hand, to seek for everything given as existing something that is necessary, that is, never to stop anywhere except at an explanation completed a priori, and, on the other hand, never to hope for this completion, that is, to accept nothing empirical as unconditioned and thereby to exempt oneself from any further derivation. In this sense both principles, as merely heuristic and regulative, attending to nothing but the formal interest of reason, can perfectly well coexist. For the one says: you shall philosophize about nature as if there were, for everything belonging to existence, a necessary first ground, for the sole purpose of introducing systematic unity into your cognition, and this by pursuing such an idea, namely an imagined supreme ground; the other, however, warns you to assume no single determination concerning the existence of things as such a supreme ground, that is, as absolutely necessary, but rather to keep the path to further derivation always open and therefore to treat it at all times as still conditioned. But if everything perceived in things must be regarded by us as conditionally necessary, then no thing (whatever may be given empirically) can be viewed as absolutely necessary either.

It follows from this, however, that you must assume the absolutely necessary outside the world: because it is meant to function solely as a principle securing the greatest attainable unity among appearances, in the role of their supreme ground, and because within the world you can never arrive at it, since the second rule commands you to regard all empirical causes of unity as at all times derived.

The philosophers of antiquity regarded all form of nature as contingent, but matter, according to the judgment of common reason, as original and necessary. Had they, however, considered matter not relatively, as the substratum of appearances, but in itself with respect to its existence, the idea of absolute necessity would at once have vanished. For nothing whatever binds reason unconditionally to this existence; rather, it can at any time and without contradiction cancel it in thought—and in thought alone did the absolute necessity reside as well. So a certain regulative principle must have underlain this persuasion. Indeed, extension and impenetrability (which together make up the concept of matter) are the supreme empirical principle of the unity of appearances and, insofar as this principle is empirically unconditioned, have in themselves a property of the regulative principle. Nevertheless, since every determination of matter that constitutes its real element, and hence impenetrability too, is an effect (an action) that must have its cause and is therefore always still derived, matter is nonetheless ill-fitted for the idea of a necessary being taken as a principle of all derived unity: for each of its real properties, being derived, is only conditionally necessary and can thus be cancelled in itself, whereby, however, the entire existence of matter would be cancelled, whereas, were this not to occur, we should have attained the highest ground of unity by empirical means—something the second regulative principle prohibits. It follows, then, that matter and, more generally, everything belonging to the world does not fit the idea of a necessary primordial being conceived as a mere principle of the greatest empirical unity, but that this being has instead to be posited outside the world; for we may then, with untroubled confidence, trace the world's appearances and their existence back to other appearances, just as if no necessary being existed at all, while still striving without cease toward the completeness of that derivation, just as if such a being were presupposed to be a supreme ground.

In view of these considerations, the ideal of the highest being is nothing other than a regulative principle of reason for viewing every connection within the world as if it sprang from an all-sufficient necessary cause, and for grounding on that basis the rule of a systematic unity, necessary according to universal laws, in the explanation of that connection; and it is not an assertion of an existence necessary in itself. But it is at the same time unavoidable to represent this formal principle, by means of a transcendental subreption, as constitutive, and to think this unity hypostatically. For just as space, because it originally makes possible all shapes, which are merely different limitations of it, is—although it is only a principle of sensibility—nonetheless taken for that very reason to be an absolutely necessary something subsisting on its own and an object given a priori in itself: so it likewise comes about quite naturally that, since the systematic unity of nature can in no way be set up as a principle of the empirical use of our reason except insofar as we ground it on the idea of a most real being serving as the highest cause—whereby this idea gets represented as an actual object, and that object in its turn, being the supreme condition, gets represented as necessary, so that a regulative principle is converted into a constitutive one; which substitution reveals itself thus: once I go on to consider this supreme being—which, relative to the world, was absolutely (unconditionally) necessary—as a thing on its own, this necessity is capable of no concept and hence could only have been encountered in my reason as a formal condition of thought, not as a material and hypostatic condition of existence.

Section 6. On the impossibility of the physico-theological proof

Given, then, that what is demanded can be furnished neither by the concept of things as such nor by experience of any existence in general, one further recourse is still left: to test whether a determinate experience — that, namely, of the things making up the present world, their makeup and their ordering — may not supply a ground of proof able to lead us reliably to the conviction that a highest being exists. A proof of this sort we would term physico-theological . Should even this turn out to be impossible, then nowhere does there remain, drawn from merely speculative reason, any sufficient proof for a being's existing that would match our transcendental idea.

In view of everything remarked above, one will readily see that the reply to this demand can be looked for quite easily and tidily. For how should an experience ever come to be given that ought to fit an idea? This is exactly what marks off the latter: that no experience whatever can ever match it. So exorbitantly great is the transcendental idea of a necessary, wholly self-sufficing primordial being, so loftily raised above all that is empirical (which is invariably conditioned), that on the one hand one can never dredge up material enough within experience to fill such a concept, and on the other hand one keeps fumbling among conditioned things, forever seeking in vain the unconditioned, for which no law of any empirical synthesis provides us so much as an instance or the least guidance.

Were the highest being to stand inside this chain of conditions, it would itself figure as one member of that same series and, exactly like the lower members over which it is set, would require yet further investigation on account of its own still higher ground. Should one instead sever it from that chain and, as a being that is purely intelligible, decline to reckon it among the series of natural causes: what bridge, then, can reason manage to build so as to arrive at it, seeing that all the laws by which one crosses from effects back to their causes — indeed every synthesis and every widening of our cognition at all — are pinned to nothing beyond possible experience, and hence solely to objects of the world of sense, and can carry meaning only in regard to these?

The world now before us throws open a theater so boundless — of variety, of order, of fitness to purpose, and of beauty, whether one tracks these through space's infinity or through its unlimited divisibility — that even by the lights our feeble understanding has managed to gather concerning it, all speech forfeits its force in the face of marvels so numerous and beyond all surveying, all numbers forfeit their power to measure, and our very thoughts forfeit every boundary, so that our judgment on the whole cannot but melt into an astonishment that, though wordless, is for that very reason the more eloquent. On every side there meets us a chain of effects and their causes, of ends and the means, of regularity in arising or in perishing; and since nothing has of its own accord entered the state it now occupies, each thing keeps pointing onward toward some other thing as its cause, which cause makes that very same further inquiry unavoidable all over again, so that the entire cosmos would in this fashion have to founder in the abyss of nothingness, did one not posit something that — subsisting beyond this endless contingent realm, primordial and self-standing in its own right — sustained it and, being the cause of its arising, secured for it at the same time its lasting persistence. This supreme cause (in regard to every thing in the world) — of what greatness are we to conceive it? The world we do not know as to its whole content, and still less can we appraise its magnitude by holding it up against everything that is possible. Yet what is to stop us — once, with respect to causality, we do stand in need of an outermost and topmost being — from at the same time placing it, by degree of perfection, above every other possibility? a thing we can bring off easily enough (though, to be sure, only through the delicate outline of an abstract concept) provided we picture within it, as within one solitary substance, every possible perfection gathered together; and this concept is favorable to reason's demand for thrift in principles, is liable in itself to no contradictions, and even assists the extension of reason's use in the very thick of experience, by way of the direction that such an idea lends toward order and purposiveness, while nowhere clashing outright with any experience.

This proof merits, on every occasion, to be named with respect. It is the most ancient, the most lucid, and the one most fitted to the common reason of humankind. It quickens the study of nature, even as it draws its own existence from that study and thereby continually acquires fresh strength. It transports ends and designs into regions where our observation would never have lit upon them unaided, and it enlarges our acquaintance with nature by the guiding line of a distinctive unity whose principle lies beyond nature. But this acquaintance recoils in turn upon its cause — that is, the idea that gave rise to it — and builds up belief in a supreme originator to the point of an irresistible conviction.

It would accordingly be not merely cheerless but also wholly pointless to try to strip anything away from the credit this proof enjoys. Reason, borne up without cease by grounds of proof this potent — grounds that swell ever larger in its handling, empirical though they remain — can be pressed down by no misgivings of refined, rarefied speculation so far that a single look it throws upon nature's wonders and the grandeur of the world's fabric would fail to wrench it out of every fretful indecision, as if out of a dream, and lift it up from one grandeur to the next as far as the utmost, from the conditioned onward to its condition as far as the topmost and unconditioned originator.

Now, although we have nothing to bring against the reasonableness and the usefulness of this procedure — indeed have every cause to commend and to spur it on — we cannot for all that grant the pretensions that this manner of proving would fain advance to apodictic certainty and to an approval standing in need of no favor and no foreign prop; and it can do the good cause no harm at all to pitch the dogmatic idiom of a sneering pseudo-reasoner down to the key of temperance and modesty proper to a belief that suffices for calm, even if it does not command unconditional submission. I contend, therefore, that the physico-theological proof is never able by itself to establish that a highest being exists, but must at all times hand the task over to the ontological proof (for which it merely furnishes the introduction) of supplying this shortfall, so that it is still the ontological that carries the sole possible ground of proof (supposing a speculative proof to be available anywhere at all), one past which no human reason can make its way.

The chief points of the physico-theological proof under discussion run as follows: 1) All across the world one meets with plain marks of an arrangement conforming to a definite design, executed with great wisdom and set within a whole whose content is of indescribable variety and whose compass is of unbounded size. 2) To the things of the world this purposive arrangement is entirely alien, clinging to them only by chance — that is to say, the natures of sundry things could never of themselves, through such manifold mutually converging means, have fallen into agreement toward definite final designs, had they not, in strict accordance with underlying ideas, been quite deliberately chosen and laid out to that end by an arranging rational principle. 3) There exists, then, an exalted and wise cause (or several) which must be the source of the world not simply as a blindly operating, all-powerful nature by way of fecundity, but as an intelligence by way of freedom. 4) That this cause is one may be gathered — with certainty as regards whatever our observation manages to reach, and beyond that, on all the principles of analogy, with probability — from the oneness of the mutual interrelation among the world's parts taken as members of a contrived edifice.

Without picking a quarrel here with natural reason over its conclusion — for out of the analogy between certain products of nature and the things human artifice turns out (when it forces nature and constrains it to work not toward nature's own ends but to bend to ours), their likeness, that is, to houses, ships, and clocks, it concludes that just such a causality, namely understanding and will, must underlie nature, once it goes on to derive the inner possibility of self-active nature (which is what first makes possible all artifice and perhaps even reason itself) from a further art, superhuman though it be, a style of inference that might well fail to survive the keenest transcendental critique — one has nonetheless to admit that, if a cause is once to be named by us, we can go about it here no more surely than along the analogy with such purposive productions, the only ones whose causes and manner of operating are fully known to us. Reason could never square it with itself were it minded to move across from the causality it is acquainted with to murky and unprovable grounds of explanation with which it is not acquainted.

On the strength of this inference, the purposiveness and neat congruity of so many natural provisions would establish merely that the form is contingent, not that the matter — that is, the substance within the world — is so; for this latter would over and above demand a proof that the world's things would of themselves be unsuited to any such order and concord under universal laws, unless they were, even in respect of their substance, the handiwork of a supreme wisdom — something, however, that would call for grounds of proof altogether other than those taken from the analogy with human artifice. The proof could thus at the very most make out a builder of the world, forever hemmed in narrowly by how serviceable the material he shapes happens to be, but never a creator of the world to whose idea all things lie subject — which comes nowhere near answering to the lofty aim held before one's eyes, namely to prove a primordial being sufficient unto all. Did we mean to prove the contingency of the matter itself, we should have to seek shelter in a transcendental argument — the very thing that was here supposed to be steered clear of.

The conclusion therefore runs from the order and purposiveness so thoroughly observable across the world, treated as an out-and-out contingent set-up, to there existing a cause proportioned to it. The concept of this cause, however, has to let us cognize something quite determinate about it, and so it can be none other than that of a being possessed of all power, all wisdom, and so forth — in short, of every perfection — as a being self-sufficing in all respects. For the predicates of very great, of amazing, of measureless power and superbness furnish no determinate concept whatever and do not, properly speaking, state what the thing may be in itself, but are merely relative representations of the object's size, which the observer (of the world) sets beside himself and beside his own power of grasp, and which come out just as full of praise whether one enlarges the object or, relatively to it, diminishes the observing subject. Wherever it is a question of the greatness (of perfection) belonging to a thing in general, no determinate concept is to be had except the one that takes in the entire span of possible perfection, and it is the whole (omnitudo) of reality alone that stands through and through determined within its concept.

Now I should not like to suppose that anyone would take it upon himself to see into the ratio of the world-magnitude he has observed (in compass as well as in content) to omnipotence, of the world-order to the highest wisdom, of the world-unity to the absolute unity of the originator, and so on. Physico-theology is therefore in no position to yield any determinate concept of the topmost cause of the world, and hence falls short of serving as a principle of theology — which is itself meant to make up the groundwork of religion.

To take the step to absolute totality is by the empirical road wholly and altogether out of the question. And yet, in the physico-theological proof, one does take it. By what device, then, does one contrive to get across so broad a gulf?

Having reached the point of marveling at the greatness of the wisdom, of the power, and so on of the world's originator, and being unable to press on further, one all at once quits this argument that has been steered by empirical grounds of proof, and turns back to the contingency of the world, which was inferred at the very start from its order and purposiveness. From this contingency by itself one now advances, purely by way of transcendental concepts, to the existence of an absolutely necessary something, and from the concept of the first cause's absolute necessity onward to the thoroughly determinate, or determining, concept belonging to it — the concept, namely, of an all-embracing reality. The physico-theological proof, then, had stuck fast in its enterprise and, in this predicament, abruptly vaulted across to the cosmological proof, and since the latter is nothing but a concealed ontological proof, it in fact carried its purpose through by pure reason alone, notwithstanding that at the outset it had renounced all connection with pure reason and had let everything ride on plain proofs from experience.

The physico-theologians, then, have no ground at all to act so aloof toward the transcendental style of proof and to peer down on it, with the conceit of clear-sighted experts on nature, as though on the gossamer of murky brooders. For were they willing merely to test themselves, they would find that, having gone forward a good way over the soil of nature and experience, and yet seeing themselves still just as distant from the object that appears to confront their reason, they all at once desert this soil and pass over into a kingdom of bare possibilities, where, upon the wings of ideas, they hope to come near to that which had slipped away from every one of their empirical searches. Once they at length fancy that, by so forceful a leap, they have secured firm footing, they broadcast the by-now determinate concept (which they have come to possess without knowing how) over the whole field of creation, and they elucidate the ideal — which was nothing but a product of pure reason — by means of experience, meagerly enough, to be sure, and far below the dignity of its object, all the while unwilling to confess that they reached this knowledge, or this presupposition, along some footpath other than experience's.

Thus at bottom the cosmological proof props up the physico-theological, and the ontological proof — concerning the existence of a single primordial being as the highest being — props up the cosmological; and since, outside these three routes, none further stands open to speculative reason, the ontological proof, wrought from nothing but pure concepts of reason, is the one and only possible proof, if indeed any proof at all is possible of a proposition raised this far above every empirical use of the understanding.

Section 7. Critique of all theology based upon speculative principles of reason

Should I mean by theology the cognition of the primordial being, then such cognition arises either out of sheer reason (theologia rationalis) or out of revelation (revelata). The first of these conceives its object in one of two ways: purely by reason, through wholly transcendental concepts alone (ens originarium, realissimum, ens entium) — this being termed transcendental theology — or through a concept lifted from nature (from our own soul), namely as the highest intelligence, in which case it would have to bear the name natural theology. Whoever allows for a transcendental theology only is termed a deist; whoever grants a natural theology as well, a theist. The deist concedes that the existence of a primordial being may, at a stretch, be cognized by reason alone, our concept of it staying merely transcendental all the while — that is, the concept simply of a being possessed of all reality, though one admitting of no closer determination. The theist, by contrast, maintains that reason can specify the object further on an analogy with nature, namely as a being that, by way of understanding and freedom, holds within itself the original ground of all remaining things. Under this heading, then, the one pictures merely a world-cause (whether operating through its nature's necessity or through freedom is left open), the other an author of the world.

Transcendental theology, for its part, is either the sort that means to trace the primordial being's existence back to experience as such (fixing nothing further about the world it belongs to), which earns the name cosmotheology, or else it supposes that it can cognize that existence out of bare concepts unassisted by any experience whatever, and so is dubbed ontotheology.

Natural theology reasons to the attributes and existence of a world-author from the make-up, order, and unity met with in this world — a world within which a twofold causality, together with its rule, has to be granted, namely nature and freedom. From this world, accordingly, it climbs up to the highest intelligence, whether as the principle of all natural, or of all ethical, order and perfection. In the first case its name is physicotheology, in the second moral theology⁶⁴.

Now since we habitually take the concept of God to mean not just some blindly-working eternal nature at the root of things, but a supreme being meant to be, through understanding and freedom, the originator of things — and since it is this concept alone that holds any interest for us — one might, on a strict reckoning, refuse the deist any belief in God at all, leaving him nothing beyond the assertion of a primordial being or highest cause. Still, seeing that a man ought not to be accused of meaning flatly to deny a thing simply because he does not dare affirm it, the gentler and fairer course is to put it thus: the deist places his belief in a God, whereas the theist believes in a living God (summam intelligentiam). Let us now set about tracking down the possible wellsprings of all these ventures of reason.

I shall be satisfied here to characterize theoretical cognition as that whereby I cognize what there is, and practical cognition as that whereby I represent to myself what ought to exist. On this footing, the theoretical use of reason is the one through which I cognize a priori (as necessary) that a thing is; the practical use, the one through which it is cognized a priori what ought to take place. Now supposing that either the being or the coming-to-pass of something is beyond all doubt certain, and yet only conditioned, then the condition for it may be either strictly necessary in some determinate shape, or else assumed as no more than optional and contingent. In the first case the condition gets postulated (per thesin), in the second merely supposed (per hypothesin). Because practical laws do exist that are utterly necessary (the moral ones), it follows that, should these require as a necessary presupposition some existence to serve as the condition under which their binding power is possible, that existence has to be postulated — and this for the reason that the conditioned thing, from which one reasons to this determinate condition, is itself cognized a priori to be flatly necessary. In what follows we shall establish, concerning the moral laws, that they do more than presuppose a supreme being's existence: standing, as they do, on wholly necessary footing in another regard, they likewise postulate that existence by right, albeit of course only in practice; for the moment, though, we lay this line of inference aside.

Given that, once the talk is solely of what there is (not of what ought to be), the conditioned handed to us in experience always gets thought of as contingent too, the condition attaching to it can never on that basis be cognized as flatly necessary, but figures only as a presupposition — relatively necessary, or better needful, yet taken in itself and a priori a wholly arbitrary one — serving reason's cognition of the conditioned. Hence, were the absolute necessity of some thing to be cognized within theoretical cognition, this could come about only out of concepts a priori, and in no way as that of a cause bearing on an existence handed over through experience.

A theoretical cognition counts as speculative when it bears on an object, or on concepts of an object, of a kind that no experience can ever reach. Set over against it stands cognition of nature, which bears on no objects, and no predicates of them, save those a possible experience is able to supply.

To reason from what comes to pass (the empirically contingent), as an effect, back to a cause is a principle proper to cognition of nature, though not to the speculative kind. For if this principle be stripped of its office as one that carries within it the condition of possible experience in general, and — with everything empirical thrown out — one wishes to pronounce it of the contingent as such, then there survives not a shred of warrant for any such synthetic proposition by which one might make out how I am to move from a thing that is over to something wholly other than it (labelled cause); indeed, in a use so purely speculative, the concept of a cause, no less than that of the contingent, forfeits all the significance whose objective reality might be rendered intelligible in concreto.

When, therefore, one reasons from the existence of the things in the world back to their cause, this move belongs not to the natural but to the speculative employment of reason: for the former refers to a cause not the things themselves (substances) but only that which happens — hence their states — as empirically contingent; whereas that the substance itself (matter) should be contingent in respect of its existence would have to rank as a purely speculative rational cognition . But suppose the talk turned merely on the world's form, on the manner of its interconnection and the changes therein, while I nonetheless meant to reason from that to a cause set wholly apart from the world: here again the judgment would be one of purely speculative reason, since in this case the object is no object of any possible experience at all. And then the principle of causality, valid as it is only inside the field of experiences and, beyond that field, devoid of any use — indeed of any significance — would be wrenched entirely away from its proper vocation.

My contention, then, is this: that every attempt at a purely speculative employment of reason in matters of theology is utterly barren and, by its very make-up, null and void, while the principles governing reason's use in nature lead to no theology at all — so that, failing moral laws laid down as groundwork or taken as a guiding thread, a theology of reason simply cannot exist anywhere. For all the understanding's synthetic principles hold good only immanently; yet cognizing a supreme being calls for a transcendent deployment of them, and for that our understanding is in no way outfitted. Were the empirically valid law of causality to carry us up to the primordial being, that being would have to figure among the chain of objects of experience — in which case, like every appearance, it would once more be conditioned itself. But even granting the leap clear past experience's frontier by way of the dynamical law linking effects to their causes: what concept could a proceeding of that sort ever get us? Nothing remotely like a concept of a supreme being, seeing that experience never lays before us the largest of all possible effects (the one meant to testify to its cause). Were we to be allowed — purely so as to leave no void standing in our reason — to make good this want of complete determination by a bare idea of highest perfection and original necessity, that might well be conceded as an indulgence, yet cannot be exacted as the due of some proof there is no resisting. The physico-theological proof might thus, perhaps, lend some force to other proofs (should any be available), tying speculation as it does to intuition: but on its own it does more to ready the understanding for theological cognition, and to aim it straight and naturally that way, than it could ever single-handedly bring the business to completion.

One sees plainly enough from all this that transcendental questions allow of none but transcendental answers — that is, answers drawn from concepts a priori alone, carrying not the least empirical alloy. Yet the question before us is plainly synthetic, calling for our cognition to be stretched past every frontier of experience — reaching, namely, to the existence of a being meant to answer to our bare idea, a being no experience can ever match. And by our earlier proofs, every synthetic cognition a priori is made possible in one way only, by its giving voice to the formal conditions of a possible experience, so that all principles carry a validity that is merely immanent — that is, they bear solely on objects of empirical cognition, or appearances. So here too a transcendental procedure achieves nothing where the theology of a merely speculative reason is at stake.

But should someone prefer to throw all the foregoing proofs of the Analytic into doubt rather than surrender his settled trust in the weight of grounds so long relied upon, still he can hardly decline to meet the challenge when I ask that he at the very least give an account of how, and by what manner of illumination, he supposes he can vault over all possible experience on the strength of naked ideas. Fresh proofs, or refurbished versions of the old ones, I would beg to be spared. For granted that there is not, in truth, much choosing to be done here — since in the last resort all the merely speculative proofs run together into one, the ontological — so that I need harbor no special dread of being pestered by any fruitfulness on the part of that sense-free reason's dogmatic partisans; and granted, moreover, that I have no wish (without fancying myself much of a combatant on that score) to turn down the summons to lay bare the fallacy in each attempt of the kind and so thwart its presumption: even so, the hope of better luck is, among people once habituated to dogmatic persuasions, never wholly removed; and I therefore rest content with the one equitable requirement — that a person justify himself, in general terms and out of the very nature of the human understanding along with all its other sources of cognition, as to how he proposes to set about widening his cognition entirely a priori and reaching it out to where no possible experience, and hence no means, avails to guarantee to any concept of our own devising its objective reality. By whatever road the understanding may have come to this concept, the existence of its object is still not to be dug out of it analytically, for cognition of the object's existence consists in just this: that the thing is set down, of itself, outside the thought. It is, however, altogether out of the question to step, of one's own accord, beyond a concept and — short of following out the empirical linkage (which anyhow yields none but appearances at any turn) — to reach the discovery of fresh objects and extravagant beings.

Yet however far reason in its merely speculative employment may fall short of so lofty a design — the reaching, that is, of a supreme being's existence — it still renders here a very great service: to set right the cognition of that being, supposing such cognition can be had from some other quarter, to bring it into accord with itself and with every intelligible design, and to cleanse it of all that might run counter to the concept of a primordial being, as well as of every admixture of empirical restrictions.

Transcendental theology, for all its shortcomings, keeps nonetheless an important negative use, and it acts as a perpetual censor of our reason on every occasion when the latter is busy merely with pure ideas, which precisely on that account will tolerate no measuring-rod other than a transcendental one. For suppose that, at some point, in a further and perhaps practical bearing, the presupposition of a highest and all-sufficient being, as the supreme intelligence, were to make its validity good past all gainsaying: it would then be of the utmost consequence to fix this concept exactly on its transcendental side, as the concept of a necessary and supremely real being, to clear away whatever runs contrary to highest reality, whatever pertains to mere appearance (to anthropomorphism in the broader sense), and at one and the same time to sweep from the path every contrary assertion, be it atheistic or deistic or anthropomorphistic — a thing very readily done under such critical handling, since the very grounds that set before our eyes the impotence of human reason as regards asserting a being of the sort to exist are bound to serve equally for proving the ineptitude of each and every counter-assertion. For where is anyone to come by the insight, through reason's pure speculation, that no highest being exists as the primordial ground of all things , or that it bears none of those attributes which, judging by their effects, we picture to ourselves on an analogy with the dynamical realities of a thinking being, or that, on that last supposition, these attributes would have to lie under all the very limitations that sensibility inescapably fastens on the intelligences we are acquainted with through experience.

For reason's merely speculative use, therefore, the supreme being stays a bare, and yet faultless ideal — a concept that closes and crowns the whole of human cognition, whose objective reality can along this route be neither established nor overturned; and should a moral theology come to be, one able to make up this deficiency, then the transcendental theology that was hitherto merely problematic will prove how little it can be dispensed with, by fixing its concept and keeping up an unbroken censorship of a reason that sensibility deceives often enough and that does not always square with its own ideas. Necessity, infinity, unity, an existence outside the world (not as a world-soul), an eternity free of the conditions of time, an omnipresence free of the conditions of space, omnipotence, etc., are one and all transcendental predicates, and for that reason the purified concept of them, which every theology stands so badly in need of, is to be drawn from transcendental theology and nowhere else.

Appendix to the transcendental dialectic

On the regulative use of the ideas of pure reason

The outcome of every dialectical attempt made by pure reason does more than corroborate what the transcendental analytic had already established—namely that all inferences of ours which aspire to carry us past the field of possible experience are fallacious and without foundation; it further instructs us in something quite particular: that in this very matter human reason harbors a natural leaning to transgress that limit, that transcendental ideas come to it every bit as naturally as the categories come to the understanding, albeit with this distinction, that whereas the latter conduct us to truth—the concord, that is, of our concepts with the object—the former call forth a merely apparent yet irresistible semblance, whose deceptiveness scarcely the sharpest critique can fend off.

Whatever has its ground in the very nature of our powers is bound to be purposive and to accord with the right employment of those powers, so long only as we can ward off a certain misconstrual and light upon their genuine direction. The transcendental ideas, then, will in all probability possess their good and therefore immanent use, notwithstanding that, should their import be misjudged and should they be taken as concepts of real things, they may prove transcendent in their application and, for just that reason, deceptive. For what can be, in respect of the whole of possible experience, either overflying (transzendent) or native (immanent) is not the idea taken by itself but purely its use, depending on whether one aims it point-blank at an object presumed to answer to it, or merely at the employment of the understanding at large with regard to the objects it has to handle; and every error of subreption is on each occasion chargeable to a shortcoming of the power of judgment, and never to the understanding or to reason.

Reason is never related directly to any object; its bearing falls solely on the understanding, and by way of the understanding upon reason's own empirical use; hence it creates no concepts (of objects) but only orders them, conferring on them that unity which they are able to possess at their utmost reach, that is, in reference to the totality of the series—something the understanding does not regard at all, its regard falling only on the connection through which everywhere series of the conditions come to stand in keeping with concepts. Properly, then, reason has as its object nothing but the understanding together with its purposive deployment; and as the understanding gathers the manifold within the object into one by means of concepts, so reason on its side gathers the manifold of the concepts into one by means of ideas, positing a certain collective unity as the terminus of the understanding's operations, which apart from this are busied only with distributive unity.

Accordingly my thesis is this: the transcendental ideas are never of any constitutive use such that concepts of particular objects would be furnished through them, and wherever they are so construed they turn out to be mere ratiocinating (dialectical) concepts. They do, on the other hand, carry a use that is excellent and indispensably requisite, a regulative one—namely, to steer the understanding toward a certain goal, in prospect of which the guiding lines of all its rules run together into a single point that, though it is but an idea (focus imaginarius)—i.e., a point that the understanding's concepts do not in truth set out from, since it lies wholly past the confines of possible experience—yet one that nevertheless serves to secure for them the greatest unity alongside the greatest reach. Now out of this there does spring up in us the deception that these guiding lines had been cast off from some object lying, in its own right, outside the field of empirically possible cognition (in the way objects are viewed behind a mirror's plane); this illusion, however (which one is after all able to keep from misleading us), is for all that indispensably requisite if, alongside the objects set before our eyes, we mean at the same time to descry those lying far off behind us at our backs—that is, if in our situation we would drill the understanding out past every given experience (that portion of the whole of possible experience) and thus toward its greatest possible and most far-reaching enlargement.

Should we take in our cognitions of the understanding across their entire range, we discover that what reason, in a manner all its own, presides over and strains to accomplish is the systematic dimension of cognition, i.e., the hanging-together of that cognition out of one single principle. Such unity on reason's part invariably presupposes an idea—that of the form belonging to a whole of cognition, a form preceding the determinate cognition of the parts and holding within it the conditions for settling a priori, for each part, its position and its relation to the rest. This idea thus lays down as a postulate a complete unity of the understanding's cognition, whereby the latter becomes not a mere haphazard aggregate but a system cohering under necessary laws. Strictly one cannot say that this idea is a concept of the object; rather it is a concept of the thoroughgoing unity of those concepts, in so far as that unity does the understanding service as a rule. Concepts of reason of this sort are not scooped up out of nature; on the contrary we put our questions to nature by the lead of these ideas, and count our cognition defective for just so long as it fails to match them. It is granted that pure earth, pure water, pure air and so forth are hardly to be met with. The concepts of them are needed all the same (concepts which, so far as full purity goes, thus take their rise only in reason), the aim being to settle rightly the share each of these natural causes contributes to the appearance; and in this way one traces all matter back to earths (the mere dead weight, as it were), salts and combustible bodies (as the force), and lastly to water and air as vehicles (machines, so to speak, through which the former exert themselves), so as to render the chemical workings of matter upon one another on the model of a mechanism. For although nobody actually phrases it so, an influence of this kind exerted by reason over the classifications of the natural scientists is exceedingly easy to spot.

If we take reason to be a power for drawing the particular out of the universal, then either the universal already stands, in and of itself, certain and given, in which case nothing beyond the power of judgment is called for to carry out the subsumption, and the particular finds itself thereby determined of necessity. This is what I shall call reason's apodictic use. Or else the universal is conceded only problematically and is a bare idea; the particular stands certain, yet the universality of the rule for this consequence remains a problem: in which event a number of particular cases, all of them certain, get tried against the rule to see if they issue from it; and here, once it looks as though every particular case one might adduce does follow from it, the inference runs to the universality of the rule, and from that in turn to all cases, including those not given in themselves. Reason employed after this fashion is what I will term its hypothetical use.

Now reason's hypothetical use, starting out from ideas laid down at its base as problematic concepts, is not properly constitutive—it is not, that is, so framed that from it, were one to judge with all strictness, the truth of the general rule assumed as hypothesis would ensue; for how could anyone come to know every possible consequence that, by ensuing from the one assumed principle, would go to prove its universality? It is, rather, merely regulative, its office being thereby to introduce, so far as may be, unity into the particular cognitions and by that means to bring the rule nearer to universality.

Reason's hypothetical use thus bears upon the systematic unity of the understanding's cognitions, and this unity is the assay-stone of the truth of the rules. Turned about, the systematic unity (as a bare idea) is no more than a projected unity, one to be looked upon not as given in itself but only as a problem; a unity, though, that answers the purpose of finding, for the manifold and particular use of the understanding, a principle , and of thereby steering that use even across cases not given and rendering it coherent.

From all this, however, one gathers only that the systematic unity—the rational unity, that is—of the understanding's manifold cognition is a logical principle, meant, wherever the understanding on its own does not reach as far as rules, to lend it a hand by way of ideas, and at once to furnish the diversity of its rules with a concord under one principle (a systematic concord) and thereby with coherence, so far as that admits of being done. But whether the makeup of the objects, or the nature of that understanding which cognizes them as such, is of itself determined toward systematic unity, and whether one might postulate this a priori, to a certain degree even without any regard to such an interest of reason, and so pronounce: all possible cognitions of the understanding (the empirical ones included) possess rational unity and stand beneath common principles from which, their diversity notwithstanding, they may be derived—that would constitute a transcendental principle of reason, one that would render systematic unity necessary not merely in a subjective and logical way, as a method, but objectively.

Let us throw light on this by taking a case of reason's employment. Among the various species of unity that fall under concepts of the understanding, there is also that of the causality of a substance, which is termed force. One and the same substance's differing appearances exhibit, on first inspection, so much unlikeness that at the outset one is nearly obliged to assume as many distinct forces in it as there are effects coming to the fore, much as in the human mind we meet sensation, consciousness, imagination, memory, wit, the power of discrimination, pleasure, desire, and so on. To begin with, a logical maxim bids us pare down this seeming diversity as far as we can, by tracking through comparison the concealed identity and looking to see whether imagination, joined with consciousness, might not be memory, wit, the power of discrimination, or perhaps even understanding and reason themselves. The idea of a fundamental force—though as to whether any such thing exists logic reaches no determination whatever—is at the least the problem of a systematic representation of the multiplicity of forces. The logical principle of reason requires that this unity be carried through as far as can be, and the more the appearances of the one force and of the other are found identical among themselves, the likelier it grows that they are nothing but differing outward expressions of one and the very same fundamental force, which (comparatively) may be styled their fundamental force. One goes about it in the same manner with the rest.

The comparative fundamental forces must, in their turn, be set against one another, so that by uncovering their concord we may draw them near to a single radical—that is, absolute—fundamental force. This rational unity is, however, purely hypothetical. One does not maintain that such a force must actually be come upon; one maintains only that it is to be sought for reason's sake, namely toward erecting certain principles for the several rules that experience may hold out to us, and that in this manner, wherever it can be done, systematic unity is to be brought into cognition.

It emerges, though, once one attends to the understanding's transcendental use, that this idea of a fundamental force as such is destined not merely as a problem for the hypothetical use, but puts forward an objective reality, whereby the systematic unity of a substance's several forces is postulated and an apodictic principle of reason erected. For even before we have so much as attempted the concord of the several forces—indeed even where, after every attempt, we fail to uncover it—we still take it for granted that such a one is there to be found; and this not solely, as in the case adduced, on account of the substance's unity, but wherever a good many are come upon, homogeneous though they be to a certain degree, as with matter in general, reason presupposes a systematic unity of manifold forces, since particular natural laws stand under more general ones, and the sparing of principles turns into not merely an economical principle of reason but an inner law of nature.

In fact there is likewise no seeing how a logical principle of the rules' rational unity could obtain, were a transcendental one not presupposed, through which a systematic unity of the kind, as clinging to the objects themselves, is taken a priori to be necessary. For with what title could reason, in its logical use, insist that the manifold of forces which nature gives us to know be handled as a merely concealed unity and be traced back, so far as lies within them, to some fundamental force, if it were left open to reason to allow that it might equally well be the case that all forces are unlike in kind and that the systematic unity of their derivation does not square with nature? For then reason would be going clean against its own vocation , in that it would set before itself, as its goal, an idea flatly at variance with the constitution of nature. Neither may one say that reason had beforehand gleaned this unity, according to principles of reason, from the contingent makeup of nature. For the law of reason enjoining the search for it is a necessary one, since without that law we should have no reason at all, without reason no coherent use of the understanding, and, that being wanting, no adequate criterion of empirical truth—so that, with an eye to this last, we are simply obliged to take nature's systematic unity as objectively valid and necessary throughout.

This transcendental assumption we find, into the bargain, tucked away in a marvelous fashion within the principles of the philosophers, even if they have not always recognized it there, nor confessed it to themselves. That all the manifolds of individual things do not shut out identity of species; that the sundry species have to be handled merely as varying determinations of a few genera, and these again of higher families yet, and so forth; that consequently a certain systematic unity of all possible empirical concepts, in so far as they admit of derivation from higher and more general ones, has to be sought out: this is a rule of the schools, a logical principle, absent which no use of reason would obtain, for we can infer from the general to the particular only so far as general properties of things are set at the base, properties under which the particular ones stand.

That such a concord is met with in nature as well is something the philosophers take for granted in the familiar rule of the schools: that one is not to multiply first beginnings (principles) beyond necessity (entia praeter necessitatem non esse multiplicanda). What this says is that the nature of things itself holds out material for rational unity, and that the seemingly boundless diversity ought not to hold us back from surmising, behind it, a unity of basic properties out of which the manifold can be derived only by further determination. This unity, mere idea though it be, has in every age been chased after so keenly that occasion has been found sooner to curb the appetite for it than to spur it on. It was already no small thing that the chemists could bring all salts back to two chief genera, the acidic and the alkaline; they go so far as to try regarding even this difference as a mere variety, a differing outward expression of one and the same basic stuff. The various kinds of earths (the stuff of stones and even of metals) have been progressively brought down to three, at length to two; yet, not even satisfied with that, they cannot shake off the thought of surmising, behind these varieties, a single genus after all, indeed perhaps a principle shared alike by these and the salts. One might perhaps suppose this to be a merely economical knack of reason, bent on sparing itself trouble as much as it can, and a hypothetical venture which, in the event of success, lends to the presupposed ground of explanation a probability precisely by way of this unity. Yet an aim so self-interested is very readily told apart from the idea by which everyone takes for granted that this rational unity befits nature itself, and that here reason does not go begging but commands, albeit without being in a position to fix the limits of that unity.

Were there present among the appearances offered to us so vast a diversity—I do not mean in form (in that respect they may well resemble one another), but in content, i.e., as regards the multiplicity of existing beings—that even the very keenest human understanding, setting one against another, could not ferret out the slightest resemblance (a case one can perfectly well conceive), then the logical law of genera would find no place at all; indeed there would be no concept of genus, no general concept whatsoever, no understanding even, seeing that the understanding has to do with nothing but such concepts. So the logical principle of genera carries a transcendental one behind it, once it is to be brought to bear on nature (whereby here I mean nothing but the objects that are given to us). By that principle a homogeneity is of necessity presupposed to pervade the manifold of a possible experience (even though its degree is beyond our a priori determining), for lacking it no empirical concepts, and hence no experience, could come about.

Over against the logical principle of genera, which lays down identity, there stands another, that of species, which calls for multiplicity and difference among things despite their agreement under one and the same genus, and which makes it a precept for the understanding to attend no less to the one than to the other. This principle (of acuteness, or of the faculty of distinguishing) sharply reins in the levity of the first (of wit), and here reason evinces a twofold interest at war with itself, on the one side an interest in scope (in generality) touching the genera, on the other an interest in content (in determinacy) bearing on the multiplicity of species, since in the first case the understanding thinks a great deal beneath its concepts, whereas in the second it thinks so much the more within them . This too shows itself in the widely divergent cast of thought among the natural scientists, some of whom (the preeminently speculative sort), hostile as it were to unlikeness, keep looking out toward the unity of the genus, while the others (preeminently empirical heads) unremittingly labor to cleave nature into such a wealth of diversity that one would well-nigh have to relinquish the hope of appraising its appearances by general principles.

Underlying this latter cast of thought there plainly lies a logical principle too, one whose aim is the systematic completeness of all our cognitions, whenever I, setting out from the genus, climb down to the manifold that may be held beneath it, and in that way seek to procure breadth for the system, just as, in the former case, mounting up toward the genus, I seek to procure simplicity. For out of the sphere of a concept designating a genus it is no more to be made out how far the dividing of it may reach than it is out of the space that matter can take up. Hence every genus demands differing species, and these in turn differing subspecies; and since not one of the latter turns up but has, once more, a sphere of its own (a compass in the sense of a conceptus communis), reason in its full extension requires that no species be regarded as the lowest taken by itself, because—being always a concept that harbors within it only what several things have in common—such a concept cannot be through-and-through determined, and so cannot be referred immediately to an individual, and must therefore forever hold further concepts, i.e., subspecies, beneath it. This law of specification might be worded thus: entium varietates non temere esse minuendas.

Yet one readily sees that this logical law too would be void of sense and application did there not lie at its base a transcendental law of specification—which, to be sure, exacts of the things that can become our objects no real infinity in respect of their differences (for that the logical principle, asserting as it does merely the indeterminacy of the logical sphere in respect of possible division, gives no ground), but which does nevertheless charge the understanding with hunting, beneath every species that comes before us, for subspecies, and, for every difference, for smaller differences. For were there no lower concepts, neither would there be any higher ones. Now the understanding cognizes everything by way of concepts alone: and so, so far as its dividing reaches, never through bare intuition, but ever again through lower concepts. The cognition of appearances in their through-and-through determination (a cognition possible through the understanding alone) exacts an unceasingly prolonged specification of its concepts and an advance toward differences that always still remain, from which abstraction was made in the concept of the species, and in that of the genus still more.

Nor can this law of specification be taken on loan from experience; for experience can yield no disclosures reaching anything like so far. Empirical specification comes to a standstill soon enough in its sorting of the manifold, unless it has been guided by the already antecedent transcendental law of specification, as a principle of reason, to search such differences out and to go on surmising them even where they do not lay themselves open to the senses. That absorbent earths are of yet further kinds (calcareous and muriatic earths) called, for its discovery, for a forestalling rule of reason, which set the understanding the task of searching out the difference by presupposing nature rich enough for that difference to be surmised. For we possess an understanding only on the presupposition of differences in nature every bit as much as on the condition that its objects carry homogeneity within them, since it is precisely the manifoldness of what can be gathered under one concept that constitutes the use of that concept and the occupation that keeps the understanding busy.

Reason, then, makes the understanding's field ready for it: 1., by a principle of the homogeneity of the manifold under higher genera; 2., by a principle of the variety of the homogeneous under lower species; and, to bring the systematic unity to completion, it appends 3. a further law of the affinity of all concepts, one prescribing an unbroken passage from each and every species to every other by a stepwise swelling of difference. We may name them the principles of the homogeneity, specification and continuity of forms. This last takes its rise from uniting the first two, once one has brought the systematic coherence to completion within the idea, alike in the ascent to higher genera and in the descent to lower species; for then all the manifolds are of one kin, seeing that one and all they stem, across every degree of extended determination, from a single, supreme genus.

The systematic unity holding under the three logical principles can be made sensible to oneself in the following way. Any concept whatever may be looked upon as a point that, as the vantage of an onlooker, has a horizon of its own, i.e., a throng of things capable of being represented from it and, so to speak, surveyed at a glance. Within this horizon a throng of points must be specifiable without end, each of these having, once more, its own narrower field of view; that is, each species holds subspecies under it by the principle of specification, and the logical horizon is built up out of narrower horizons (subspecies) only, and not out of points bereft of any compass (individuals). But for differing horizons, i.e., genera, each fixed by just so many concepts, one can think a common horizon drawn, from which all of them together are surveyed as from a central point—the horizon that is the higher genus—until at last the highest genus is the general and true horizon, fixed from the vantage of the loftiest concept and gathering under it all the manifoldness as genera, species and subspecies.

To this loftiest vantage the law of homogeneity conducts me; to all the lower ones and their utmost variety, the law of specification. But since in this manner nothing empty lies within the entire compass of all possible concepts, and outside that compass nothing can be met with, there springs, from the assuming of that general field of view and the through-and-through division of it, the principle: non datur vacuum formarum, i.e., there do not exist diverse original and first genera standing, as it were, in isolation and cut off from one another (by some empty interval), but all the manifold genera are merely partitions within a single, supreme and general genus; and springing straight from this principle, its immediate consequence: datur continuum formarum, i.e., all the differences of species border upon one another and grant no passage between one and another by any leap, but only through all the smaller degrees of difference by which one can get from the one to the other; in short, no species or subspecies whatever counts, within reason's concept, as another's nearest neighbor; on the contrary, intermediate species remain forever possible, whose difference from the first and the second is smaller than the difference these bear to one another.

The first law, accordingly, wards off any extravagant plunge into the manifoldness of diverse original genera and commends homogeneity; the second, by contrast, once more curbs this leaning toward concord and bids us mark off the subspecies before ever we turn, with our general concept, to individuals. The third brings the pair into union, in that, amid the utmost manifoldness, it prescribes homogeneity all the same, by way of the stepwise passage from one species to the next—which betokens a kind of kinship among the differing branches, in so far as one and all they have sprung from a single stock.

This logical law of the continui specierum (formarum logicarum), however, presupposes a transcendental one (lex continui in natura), lacking which the use of the understanding would only be led astray by that precept, for it might well take a course diametrically opposed to nature. This law must therefore rest upon grounds purely transcendental and not empirical. Were the latter the case, it would arrive later than the systems; whereas it is in truth what first brought forth whatever is systematic in the cognition of nature. Nor, behind these laws, lie hidden any designs upon a trial to be undertaken with them as bare experiments, though to be sure this coherence, where it holds good, supplies a mighty ground for holding the hypothetically devised unity to be well-founded, so that in this respect too they have their utility; rather, one plainly perceives in them that they judge the thrift of underlying causes, the multiplicity of effects, and a kinship of nature's members springing therefrom, to be in themselves rational and befitting nature, and that these principles accordingly bear their commendation directly, and not merely as knacks of method.

But one readily sees that this continuity of forms is nothing but an idea, one for which no congruent object can be pointed to in experience: not only on the score that the species in nature stand actually divided and must therefore of themselves make up a quantum discretum—so that, were the stepwise advance in their kinship continuous, it would have to embrace as well a true infinity of intervening members lodged within any two given species, which cannot be—but also because we can put this law to no determinate empirical use whatever, seeing that by it not the least mark of affinity is signified telling us according to which mark, and how far, we are to seek out the sequence of degrees of their difference, but nothing beyond a general intimation that seek it we must.

Were we to reorder the principles just cited according to their sequence, so as to set them in keeping with the use of experience, the principles of systematic unity would stand roughly so: manifoldness, kinship and unity, each of them, however, taken as an idea at the highest pitch of its completeness. Reason presupposes the cognitions of the understanding, which are applied in the first place to experience, and looks for their unity by ideas—a unity ranging far beyond what experience can attain. The kinship of the manifold, its difference notwithstanding, under one principle of unity concerns not merely the things but, far more than that, the bare properties and forces of things. Thus, suppose that some experience (not yet fully set right) hands us the planets' course as circular, and we come upon deviations: we then surmise them to reside in whatever is able to alter the circle, by a constant law, through all the endless intervening degrees, into one of these divergent orbits; that is, the planets' motions that are not circles will come more or less near to the circle's properties and fall into the ellipse. The comets display a diversity of their paths greater still, since (as far as observation carries) they do not so much as come back on a circle; yet we conjecture a parabolic course, one that is nonetheless of the ellipse's kin and that, when the long axis of the latter is drawn out very far, cannot be told apart from it in any observation of ours. So it is that, following the lead of those principles, we come to a unity of the genera of these paths in their shape, and thereby further to a unity in the cause of all the laws of their motion (gravitation); from there we thereafter widen our conquests, undertaking to explain out of the same principle every variety and seeming departure from those rules as well, and in the end even to add more than experience can ever bear out—namely, following the rules of kinship, to think for ourselves cometary paths that are downright hyperbolic, along which these bodies quit our solar world altogether and, passing from sun to sun , knit together in their course the remoter tracts of a world-system that, for us, is boundless and that hangs together through one and the same moving force.

What is noteworthy in these principles, and what alone engages us, is this: that they appear to be transcendental, and that, although they hold nothing but ideas for the guidance of reason's empirical use—ideas which that use can trail only asymptotically, so to speak, i.e., by mere approximation, without ever coming up to them—they yet, as synthetic a priori propositions, carry an objective though undetermined validity, serving as a rule of possible experience, and are indeed put to work with good fortune, as heuristic principles, in the elaboration of that experience, without one's being able for all that to bring off a transcendental deduction of them, which, as was made out above, is at all times impossible where ideas are concerned.

In the transcendental analytic we set apart, among the understanding's principles, the dynamical ones—as principles of intuition that are merely regulative—from the mathematical ones, which with respect to intuition are constitutive. This notwithstanding, the said dynamical laws are indeed constitutive with respect to experience, in that they render possible a priori the very concepts apart from which no experience takes place. Principles of pure reason, by contrast, cannot be constitutive even with respect to empirical concepts, for no matching schema of sensibility can be supplied to them, and so they can own no object in concreto. Now if I dispense with such an empirical employment of them in the role of constitutive principles, how am I nonetheless to make good for them a regulative employment, and along with it some objective validity, and what significance could such a use bear?

The understanding makes up an object for reason, exactly as sensibility does so for the understanding. To render the unity of all possible empirical acts of the understanding systematic is a task of reason's, in the same way that the understanding ties the manifold of appearances together by concepts and brings it beneath empirical laws. The acts of the understanding, though, without schemata of sensibility, are indeterminate; and just so the unity of reason is, in respect of the conditions under which, and the degree up to which, the understanding is to bind its concepts systematically, of itself indeterminate. Yet although for a thoroughgoing systematic unity of all the understanding's concepts no schema can be tracked down in intuition, an analogue of such a schema can and must for all that be supplied—the idea, namely, of the maximum of the partitioning and the unifying of the understanding's cognition within one principle. For the greatest and absolutely complete admits of being thought determinately, since all restricting conditions, which would give an indeterminate manifoldness, are set aside. The idea of reason is therefore an analogue to a schema of sensibility, yet with this difference: that applying the understanding's concepts to reason's schema does not, as elsewhere, amount to a cognition of the object itself (as when the categories are applied to their sensible schemata), but amounts only to a rule or principle for the systematic unity of all employment of the understanding. And since every principle that settles a priori for the understanding a thoroughgoing unity of its employment holds good—though only indirectly—of the object of experience as well, the principles of pure reason will likewise possess objective reality in respect of that object; not, however, so as to determine anything in it, but only so as to indicate the procedure by which the understanding's empirical, determinate use in experience can be rendered thoroughly consonant with itself, through being brought, as far as may be, into connection with the principle of thoroughgoing unity, and derived therefrom.

All subjective principles that are drawn, not from the object's constitution, but from reason's interest with a view to a certain attainable perfection in the cognition of that object, I call maxims of reason. Thus there exist maxims of speculative reason resting purely on that reason's speculative interest, however much it may look as though they were objective principles.

When principles that are merely regulative come to be regarded as constitutive, they may, as objective principles, fall into conflict; but if one regards them merely as maxims, then there is no genuine conflict, only a differing interest of reason that occasions the parting of ways in thought. Reason has, in fact, but one single interest, and the quarrel among its maxims is nothing more than a difference—and a reciprocal delimiting—of the methods for giving that interest its satisfaction.

In this way, with this reasoner the interest in manifoldness carries more weight (following the principle of specification), while with that one it is the interest in unity (following the principle of aggregation). Each of the two believes he holds his judgment from an insight into the object, and yet grounds it purely on how firmly or loosely he cleaves to one or the other of the two principles, no one of which reposes on objective grounds, resting instead solely on reason's interest, and which might on that account be better termed maxims than principles. When I behold discerning men at odds with one another over the characterization of human beings, of animals or plants, indeed even of the bodies of the mineral realm—where the one party, say, assumes particular national characters grounded in descent, or else settled and heritable distinctions among families, races, and the like, while the others set their conviction on nature's having, in this respect, laid down dispositions wholly uniform, all distinction resting merely on outward contingencies—then I need only weigh the makeup of the object to grasp that it lies far too deeply concealed for either of them to be speaking from insight into the object's nature. It is nothing other than reason's twofold interest, of which the one side takes to heart, or affects, the one, and the other side the other—hence the difference of the maxims of natural manifoldness or of natural unity, maxims that may perfectly well be reconciled, but which, so long as they pass for objective insights, give rise not to strife alone but to obstacles besides, that hold truth up for a long while, until a means is hit upon of reconciling the interest at odds and setting reason at ease over the matter.

It stands the same way with the affirming or the impugning of the much-invoked law of the continuous scale of created things, a law set going by Leibniz and finely trimmed out by Bonnet, which is nothing beyond a compliance with the principle of affinity resting on reason's interest; for observation and insight into nature's arrangement could by no means hand it over as an objective assertion. The rungs of such a scale, as experience is able to point them out to us, stand much too far apart, and our supposedly little differences are commonly, in nature herself, gulfs so wide that upon observations of the kind (above all with a great manifoldness of things, where finding certain resemblances and approximations must always come easy) nothing at all is to be counted as designs of nature . The method, on the other hand, of hunting out order in nature by such a principle, and the maxim of taking such an order—indeterminately, though, as to where or how far—to be well-grounded in a nature as such, is assuredly a legitimate and admirable regulative principle of reason, one that as such reaches much further than experience or observation could ever match, yet without fixing anything, serving only to mark out for experience the road toward systematic unity.