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.

On the ultimate end of the natural dialectic of human reason

In themselves the ideas of pure reason can never be dialectical; a deceptive semblance arises in us from them solely through their misapplication, for it is the nature of our reason that imposes them on us, and that highest court over every entitlement and claim belonging to our speculation could not conceivably harbor deceptions and illusions of its own. In all likelihood, then, within the natural predisposition of our reason they serve some good and purposive function. The mob of would-be reasoners, however, raises its customary outcry over incoherence and contradiction, and vilifies the regime whose deepest designs it cannot fathom, though to that regime's benevolent workings it should owe its own survival, and even the cultivation that first enables it to find fault and pass sentence.

No concept can be used a priori with any assurance until its transcendental deduction has been carried through. It is true that the ideas of pure reason admit no deduction of the sort available for the categories; but should they possess even the slightest objective validity—however indeterminate—and not amount merely to vacuous entities of thought (entia rationis ratiocinantis), a deduction of them must at all events be feasible, however far it may depart from what can be undertaken for the categories. Herein lies the culmination of pure reason's critical task, and this is what we now mean to take in hand.

Whether something is presented to my reason as an object pure and simple or merely as an object in the idea makes for a considerable difference. In the first case my concepts are directed at determining the object; in the second there is really nothing but a schema, to which no object is conceded directly—not even on a hypothesis—and which functions only to let us represent other objects indirectly, through their relation to this idea under the aspect of their systematic unity. So I maintain that the concept of a supreme intelligence amounts to a mere idea, i.e., its objective reality is not supposed to lie in its being referred straightforwardly to an object (on that reading we could offer no justification of its objective validity); it is instead simply a schema—arranged under conditions of the utmost unity of reason—for the concept of a thing as such, whose sole function is to preserve, throughout our reason's empirical employment, the utmost systematic unity, in that the object of experience is derived, so to speak, from the fictive object of this idea taken as its basis or cause. The claim then runs, for instance: the things of the world are to be viewed as if their existence derived from a supreme intelligence . On this footing the idea is really no more than a heuristic, rather than an ostensive, concept: it points out, not what constitution an object has, but rather how, guided by it, we ought to seek the constitution and interconnection of objects of experience generally. Suppose, now, it can be established that although the three kinds of transcendental idea (the psychological, the cosmological, and the theological) bear on no object directly answering to them, nor on any such object's determination, still, once such an object in the idea is presupposed, every rule for reason's empirical exercise yields systematic unity and invariably enlarges cognition drawn from experience, never running afoul of it: then to work by ideas of this sort is a maxim of reason that cannot be dispensed with. And this constitutes the transcendental deduction of all the ideas belonging to speculative reason—not as constitutive principles by which our cognition might be extended to a greater range of objects than experience affords, but as regulative ones governing the systematic unity of the manifold that empirical cognition presents, a manifold thereby better cultivated and rectified within its own limits than the bare use of the understanding's principles, unaided by such ideas, could achieve.

Let me put this more plainly. Taking the ideas just mentioned as principles, we shall, first (in psychology), tie together all the appearances, activities, and receptivity of our mind along the thread of inner experience as if it were one simple substance persisting (during life, at any rate) with personal identity, while the states belonging to it—among which those of the body count merely as external conditions—undergo continuous change. We are bound, second (in cosmology), to trace the conditions of natural appearances, inner no less than outer, in an inquiry that can nowhere reach an end, as if that inquiry led into an infinite regress lacking any first or highest member—though this does not make us deny, beyond all appearances, their purely intelligible first grounds, which nonetheless we may never introduce into the fabric of natural explanation, since they lie wholly outside our acquaintance. Lastly and third, we must (as regards theology) regard whatever might ever enter the fabric of possible experience as if experience made up a unity that is absolute, yet dependent through and through and still conditioned within the sensible world—while regarding it at the same time as if the totality of appearances (the sensible world itself) rested on one sole, supreme, and wholly sufficient ground beyond its own extent, namely a reason that is, so to speak, self-standing, primordial, and creative, in regard to which we so orient every empirical use of our reason, at its widest reach, as if the objects had one and all issued from that prototype of all reason. Which is to say: not to derive the soul's inner appearances from a simple thinking substance, but rather to derive them from one another under the guidance of the idea of a simple being; and not to trace the world's order and its systematic unity back to a supreme intelligence, but rather to borrow from the idea of a supremely wise cause the rule by which reason, in linking causes with effects across the world, may be turned to best account for its own contentment.

As things stand, nothing whatever stops us from taking up these ideas as objective and hypostatized as well—nothing save the cosmological idea alone, in whose case reason collides with an antinomy the moment it seeks to carry this through (the psychological and the theological involve no such thing). For they contain no contradiction; how, then, might anyone contest their objective reality against us, when he knows just as little of their possibility —too little to deny it—as we know in order to affirm it! Still, to assume something it is not yet enough that nothing positively stands in the way; nor can we be allowed to bring in figments of thought—which outrun all our concepts, though they clash with none—as real and determinate objects, merely on the credit of a speculative reason keen to see its work done. Hence they are not to be assumed in their own right; only their reality as a schema of that regulative principle—the systematic unity of all cognition of nature—should be granted standing, so that they serve as bases merely by way of analogues of real things, and never as those things taken in themselves. What we remove from the object of the idea are the conditions restricting our concept of the understanding—the very conditions, however, that alone put us in a position to possess any determinate concept of a thing whatever. And now we frame the thought of a certain something whose intrinsic nature is entirely beyond our concept, yet to which we do attribute a relation to the whole assemblage of appearances—one analogous to the relation the appearances bear to one another.

If, therefore, we posit ideal beings of this kind, what we actually broaden is not our cognition past the objects that possible experience allows, but only the empirical unity of those objects, and this by means of the systematic unity of which the idea supplies the schema—so that the idea counts not as a constitutive principle but strictly as a regulative one. For in setting down a thing that answers to the idea—a something, or a real being—we are by no means saying that our aim is to widen our cognition of things through transcendent concepts; this being gets posited within the idea alone and not in its own right, and thus solely to give expression to the systematic unity that is meant to guide us in reason's empirical employment, while leaving wholly open what the ground of that unity might be, or what inner character belongs to such a being upon which, as cause, it depends.

So the transcendental concept of God—the one determinate concept that merely speculative reason yields—is, taken in the strictest sense, deistic: that is, reason does not so much as supply that concept's objective validity, but hands over only the idea of a something in which every empirical reality finds its supreme and necessary unity grounded, a something we can conceive in no way other than by analogy to a real substance that, under laws of reason, would be the cause of all things —assuming, that is, that we go so far as to conceive it at all as a distinct object, and do not instead, resting satisfied with the bare idea of reason's regulative principle, lay aside, as extravagant for the human understanding, the bringing-to-completion of all the conditions of thinking; a course that, however, cannot stand together with the aspiration to a thoroughgoing systematic unity in our cognition—an aspiration on which reason at least imposes no bounds.

And so it comes to pass that, in assuming a divine being, I possess not the slightest concept either of the inner possibility of its supreme perfection or of the necessity of its existence, yet am thereafter able to meet every other question bearing on what is contingent, and to afford reason the fullest contentment regarding the greatest unity it pursues in its empirical employment—though none regarding that presupposition itself; which goes to show that it is reason's speculative interest, not any insight of its own, that licenses it to depart from a point situated so far above its province, so as from there to take in its objects as one complete whole.

At this juncture a divergence in ways of thinking emerges under one and the same presupposition—a divergence rather fine-grained, and yet, for transcendental philosophy, of considerable weight. I may well have adequate grounds for positing a thing in relative fashion (suppositio relativa) and yet lack any warrant to posit it without qualification (suppositio absoluta). This distinction holds wherever the matter concerns nothing but a regulative principle whose necessity we do recognize in itself, though not the wellspring of that necessity, and for the sake of which we take on a supreme ground with the sole intention of conceiving the principle's universality all the more determinately—as, say, when I conceive a being to exist that answers to an idea that is merely, and indeed transcendentally, an idea. For in that instance the thing's existence in its own right can never be something I assume, given that no concepts by which I might determinately conceive any object ever reach so far, and given that the very idea rules out the conditions under which my concepts would have objective validity. Apart from the employment in which they render possible the empirical cognition of an object, the concepts of reality, of substance, of causality, and even that of necessity as regards existence, carry no meaning whatever by which any object might be determined. They will therefore serve to explain the possibility of things within the sensible world, yet never how a world-whole in its own right could be possible, seeing that the ground of such an explanation would necessarily lie beyond the world, and hence be no object of any possible experience. Even so, a being of this incomprehensible sort—the object of a mere idea—I can indeed posit relatively to the sensible world, albeit not in its own right. For suppose an idea (that of a systematically complete unity, of which I shall shortly speak with more precision) underlies the widest empirical employment my reason can have—an idea never as such to be exhibited adequately in experience, and yet strictly indispensable if empirical unity is to be brought as near as may be to the highest degree: then I shall find myself not merely licensed but positively required to make this idea real, i.e., to set a genuine object under it, though only as a something in general, one I have no acquaintance with in itself, and to which, purely as the ground of that systematic unity, I ascribe, in relation to the latter, such characteristics as run parallel to the understanding's concepts in their empirical employment. Accordingly, on the model of the realities found in the world—of substances, of causality, of necessity—I shall think a being in which all of this is possessed at the peak of perfection; and because this idea rests on my reason alone, I shall be able to think that being as a self-standing reason which, by way of ideas of supreme harmony and unity, is the cause of the world-whole, so that I drop every condition that would bound the idea, with the single purpose of making possible—under the safeguard of such a primordial ground—a systematic unity of the manifold within the world-whole, and, through that unity, the widest empirical use of reason attainable, in that I look upon every connection as if it were the ordinance of a supreme reason of which our own is but a feeble replica. This highest being I then think through nothing but concepts whose proper application lies only within the sensible world; but seeing that I put that transcendental presupposition to no use except a relative one—namely, that it should furnish the substratum for the greatest unity of experience attainable—I am fully entitled to think a being distinguished by me from the world by means of characteristics that pertain to the sensible world and to it alone. For it is in no way my demand—nor have I any right to demand it—that I should cognize this object of my idea as it may be in its own nature; I have no concepts fit for that, and even the concepts of reality, substance, and causality—indeed of necessity in existing—forfeit all meaning and become hollow labels for concepts wholly devoid of content, once I hazard beyond the field of the senses with them. All I think is the relation that a being, in itself wholly unknown to me, bears to the greatest systematic unity of the world-whole, and this only so as to make it the schema of the regulative principle governing my reason's widest possible empirical employment.

Turning our gaze now upon the transcendental object of our idea, we recognize that its actuality is not something we can presuppose in itself by the concepts of reality, substance, causality, and the like, for such concepts find not the least foothold in anything set entirely apart from the sensible world. Reason's supposition of a supreme being as the highest cause is thus purely relative, framed on behalf of the sensible world's systematic unity, and is nothing more than a something in the idea, of whose intrinsic nature we hold no concept. This likewise makes clear why, in reference to what is presented to the senses as existent, we do require the idea of a primordial being necessary in itself, and yet can at no point form the slightest concept of that being and of its absolute necessity.

We are now in a position to display plainly the upshot of the whole transcendental dialectic, and to fix with precision the ultimate end of those ideas of pure reason that turn dialectical solely through misconstrual and want of caution. Pure reason is in truth busied with nothing beyond itself, nor can it have any other occupation, for what gets handed to it is not the objects that would go to the unity of the concept of experience, but rather the understanding's cognitions, which are to make up the unity of the concept of reason—that is, their coherence within a single principle. Reason's unity is the unity belonging to a system, and such systematic unity does not furnish reason with an objective principle for spreading it across the objects, but serves subjectively, as a maxim, for spreading it across every empirical cognition of objects that is possible. All the same, the systematic linkage that reason is able to impart to the understanding's empirical use not only furthers that use's expansion but at once vouches for its correctness as well; and the principle underlying such a systematic unity is likewise objective, though after an indeterminate manner (principium vagum): it operates not as a constitutive principle settling anything about its direct object, but as a merely regulative principle and maxim, one that carries reason's empirical use onward toward the infinite (the indeterminate) by throwing open fresh routes unknown to the understanding, and makes it secure, never in the least running counter to the laws that govern that empirical use.

Reason, however, has no way of conceiving this systematic unity except by furnishing its idea, at the same time, with an object—one that no experience is capable of furnishing; for at no time does experience offer up an instance of complete systematic unity. Granted, this being of reason (ens rationis ratiocinatae) is a mere idea, and hence is not posited outright and in its own right as anything actual, but is set down only problematically (since it eludes every concept of the understanding), the aim being to view all interconnection among things in the sensible world as if such things found their ground in this being of reason—yet solely with the design of erecting upon it the systematic unity that reason cannot do without, a unity in every respect conducive to the understanding's empirical cognition and at no point an obstacle to it.

The sense of this idea is misjudged at once if one treats it as the affirmation—or so much as the assumption—of some real thing to which one would think to credit the ground of the world's systematic makeup; on the contrary, one leaves it altogether open what character that ground, which slips away from our concepts, may possess in itself, and one merely erects an idea as the vantage point from which alone that unity, so indispensable to reason and so wholesome for the understanding, admits of being spread abroad; in short, this transcendental thing is nothing but the schema of the regulative principle in question, whereby reason, to the extent it can, diffuses systematic unity across all experience.

The primary object of an idea of this kind is I myself, taken purely as a thinking nature (soul). Should I set about searching out the properties by which a thinking being exists in itself, experience is what I must interrogate, and of all the categories not one can I bring to bear on this object save so far as its schema stands given within sensible intuition. By this route, however, I never attain any systematic unity across all the appearances of inner sense. In lieu of the concept drawn from experience, then (the concept of what the soul really is), which can take us no great distance, reason lays hold of the concept of the empirical unity of all thought, and, by thinking that unity as unconditioned and primordial, fashions out of it a concept of reason (an idea)—the idea of a simple substance that, in itself unalterable (personally identical), stands in community with other real things beyond it; in short, the idea of a simple, self-standing intelligence. In this it keeps in view nothing else than principles of systematic unity for explaining the soul's appearances—namely, to regard every determination as inhering in one single subject, every power, so far as can be managed, as issuing from a single basic power, all variation as pertaining to the states of one selfsame abiding being, and to represent every appearance in space as thoroughly distinct from the acts of thinking. That simplicity of the substance, and the rest, was meant to be no more than the schema for this regulative principle, and is not laid down on the supposition that it forms the real ground of the soul's properties. For those properties may equally repose on grounds of a quite different sort, entirely unknown to us; and indeed, even were we to let these assumed predicates count of the soul without qualification, they would not really yield cognition of the soul as it is in itself, seeing that they amount to a mere idea incapable of any presentation in concreto. From a psychological idea so understood nothing but benefit can follow, provided only one is on guard against letting it pass for anything beyond a mere idea—that is, as holding merely in relation to the systematic use of reason concerning our soul's appearances. For on these terms no empirical laws of bodily appearances, which belong to an altogether different order, get mixed into the explanation of what pertains to inner sense alone; no airy hypotheses about the generation, the perishing, and the palingenesis of souls, and so forth, are let in; the examination of this object of inner sense is thus conducted quite purely, unadulterated by disparate properties, and beyond this the inquiry of reason is aimed at carrying the grounds of explanation within this subject, so far as may be, up to one sole principle—all of which is accomplished best, indeed accomplished only, by a schema of this sort, as if it were a real being. Nor can the psychological idea stand for anything but the schema of a regulative concept. For were I even to pose the question whether the soul might not, in itself, be of spiritual nature, the question would carry no sense at all. For by a concept of that kind I sweep away not corporeal nature merely but nature in its entirety—that is, every predicate of any possible experience, and with it every condition under which an object could be thought for such a concept; and it is precisely this that alone gives ground for saying a concept has sense.

Reason's second regulative idea, in its merely speculative capacity, is the concept of the world taken as a whole. For nature is, strictly speaking, the one given object with regard to which reason stands in need of regulative principles. This nature comes in two forms—the thinking and the corporeal. But for the corporeal, in order to conceive it as to its inner possibility—which is to say, to settle how the categories apply to it—no idea is called for, no representation that would outrun experience; nor, indeed, is any such idea possible here, since within this domain we are led by sensible intuition alone, and not, as with the basic psychological concept (the I), by something that harbors a definite form of thinking, namely its unity a priori. Thus for pure reason there is left to us nothing beyond nature at large and the completeness, on some principle or other, of the conditions within it. That the series of these conditions should form an absolute totality, when their members are traced out in derivation, is an idea that can, to be sure, never fully materialize within reason's empirical use, though it does furnish a rule for how we are to proceed in that regard: namely, in accounting for given appearances (whether descending or ascending) as if the series ran on infinitely in itself, i.e., in indefinitum; but wherever reason itself falls to be regarded as a determining cause (in freedom), and hence with practical principles, we proceed as though what lay before us were an object not of the senses but of the pure understanding, where the conditions admit of being placed no longer within the series of appearances but beyond it, and where the series of states may be looked upon as if it had commenced without qualification (through an intelligible cause); the whole of which goes to prove that the cosmological ideas are but regulative principles, far indeed from constitutively positing, as it were, any real totality of such series. Everything further may be sought out where it belongs, under the Antinomy of Pure Reason.

Reason's third idea, which harbors a merely relative supposition of a being counted as the single, all-sufficing cause behind every cosmological series, is the concept of God. The object of this idea we have not the slightest ground for assuming outright (for supposing it in itself); for what could ever move us, or so much as authorize us, out of a being's bare concept to credit or affirm it in itself as one of supreme perfection and, by its very nature, unconditionally necessary—were it not the world, in whose regard alone such a supposition can be needed; and here it comes plainly to light that the idea of that being, like every speculative idea, purports to say no more than that reason enjoins us to view all the world's interconnection by principles of a systematic unity, hence as if the whole had sprung, one and all, from a single all-embracing being as its supreme and all-sufficing cause. From this it stands out clearly that here reason can be after nothing but its own formal rule in enlarging its empirical use, and never after an extension beyond all boundaries of the empirical use, so that no constitutive principle for its use as directed upon possible experience lies concealed beneath this idea.

The supreme formal unity, resting on concepts of reason alone, is the purposive unity of things, and reason's speculative interest makes it requisite to look upon all arrangement in the world as though it had grown out of the design of a reason that is highest of all . For a principle of this sort throws open to our reason, once it is brought to bear on the field of experience, wholly new prospects of knitting the world's things together by teleological laws and thereby arriving at their greatest systematic unity. To presuppose a highest intelligence as the one and only cause of the world-whole—though, admittedly, only within the idea—can accordingly at all times profit reason and yet at no time do it harm. For if, concerning the earth's figure (round, yet a little flattened)⁶⁵, concerning its mountains and seas, and so on, we posit in advance nothing but the wise designs of an author, then we can , along this very path, make a great many discoveries. So long as we hold to this presupposition as a merely regulative principle, not even error can do us harm. For the most that could ever follow from it is this: that in a place where we had counted on a teleological linkage (nexus finalis), one merely mechanical or physical (nexus effectivus) turns up, whereby in such a case we do no more than forgo one further unity, without wrecking the unity of reason in its empirical use. Yet even such a countercheck is powerless to touch the law itself as regards its general, teleological bearing overall. For though an anatomist may be shown to have erred when he assigns some limb of an animal body to an end that one can distinctly demonstrate does not issue from it, it remains utterly impossible to establish, in any given case, that an ordering of nature, whatever it might be, serves no end whatsoever. This is why physiology as well (that of the physicians) stretches its highly restricted empirical acquaintance with the ends served by the limb-structure of an organic body, by means of a principle that pure reason alone prompted, so far that within it one presumes—quite boldly, and with the assent of every judicious mind—that everything in the animal has its use and its good design; a presupposition which, were it to be constitutive, reaches out much farther than observation up to now could warrant, from which it may in turn be gathered that it is but a regulative principle of reason, one meant to bring us to the highest systematic unity through the idea of a purposive causality lodged in the supreme world-cause, and as though that cause, being a highest intelligence, were the source of everything by the wisest of designs.

Should we, however, abandon this confinement of the idea to a purely regulative use, reason is misled in ever so many ways, for it then forsakes the soil of experience—which must, after all, hold the markers of its course—and hazards itself above that soil toward the incomprehensible and the unsearchable, at whose altitude it inevitably grows giddy, since from that vantage it finds itself wholly severed from every use that squares with experience.

The first blunder springing from a use of the idea of a highest being that is not merely regulative but (in defiance of an idea's very nature) constitutive is lazy reason (ignava ratio)⁶⁶. That name may be given to any principle which leads one to treat one's inquiry into nature, wherever it may stand, as flatly finished, so that reason lays itself down to rest, as though it had discharged its task in full. Hence even the psychological idea, once it is pressed into service as a constitutive principle for explaining our soul's appearances, and then indeed for stretching what we cognize of this subject clear past all experience (its condition after death), does make things exceedingly convenient for reason, but it likewise corrupts and undermines outright all use of reason in nature under experience's guidance. Thus the dogmatic spiritualist accounts for the person's unity, abiding unchanged through every shift of state, out of the unity of the thinking substance that he fancies he perceives immediately in the I; the concern we bring to matters that are to befall us only once we are dead, out of an awareness of the immaterial character of our thinking subject, and so forth; and he spares himself all inquiry, from physical grounds of explanation, into the cause of these inner appearances of ours, in that he brushes past the immanent sources of cognition supplied by experience—by what amounts to the decree of a transcendent reason—for his own ease, but at the forfeit of every insight. This detrimental upshot leaps still more sharply into view with the dogmatism attaching to our idea of a supreme intelligence, and to the theological system of nature (physico-theology) that is thereupon mistakenly built. For at that point every purpose displaying itself in nature—often enough purposes we ourselves have foisted upon it—serves to make the search for causes thoroughly convenient for us: in place of seeking them within the universal laws of matter's mechanism, one appeals straightaway to the unsearchable counsel of a highest wisdom and reckons the labor of reason concluded just when one dispenses with reason's use—a use that nonetheless finds its guiding thread nowhere except where the arrangement of nature and the succession of alterations, following their inner and universal laws, place it in our hands. This blunder is escapable if we decline to view merely a handful of nature's parts—say, the spread of the solid land, the way it is built, or the makeup and placement of the mountains, or perhaps only the organization within the plant and animal realms—from the standpoint of purposes, and instead render this systematic unity of nature, in its bearing on the idea of a highest intelligence, entirely universal. For then what we set as our basis is a purposiveness conforming to nature's universal laws, from which no single arrangement is exempted, each being merely picked out for us as more or less discernible, and we possess a regulative principle for the systematic unity of a teleological linkage—one that, however, we do not fix beforehand, but are entitled only to track, in anticipation of it, along the physico-mechanical linkage that follows universal laws. For it is only thus that the principle of purposive unity can perpetually widen reason's use with respect to experience, without curtailing it in any instance.

The second blunder, one issuing from a misreading of the principle of systematic unity just discussed, is precisely the case of perverted reason (perversa ratio, hysteron proteron rationis). The idea of systematic unity ought to have served no other function than, as a regulative principle, to make us seek that unity in the connection of things under nature's universal laws, and, to whatever extent something of it can be come upon by the empirical route, to make us believe accordingly that we have drawn nearer the completeness of its use, though reach it we assuredly never shall. In the reverse of this, one inverts the matter and starts out by laying down as its basis, hypostatically, the actuality of a principle of purposive unity; one settles the concept of such a highest intelligence anthropomorphically—since in itself it is utterly unsearchable—and thereupon presses purposes on nature by force and by fiat, rather than seeking them, as would be proper, along the road of physical investigation: with the result that teleology, whose office was merely to round out nature's unity under universal laws, now works instead to remove it, while reason on top of this robs itself of its very purpose, namely to prove, on this footing, from nature, that such an intelligent supreme cause exists. For if the supreme purposiveness in nature cannot be presupposed a priori—as belonging, that is, to nature's very essence—by what means is one to be set on the way to seek it out and, climbing its scale of degrees, to draw near the topmost perfection of an author as a perfection unconditionally necessary and therefore knowable a priori? What the regulative principle requires is that systematic unity, in the guise of unity of nature—a unity cognized not by experience merely but presupposed a priori, indeterminately though it be—be presupposed without qualification, and so as flowing from the essence of things. But if I first place a highest ordering being at the base, the unity of nature is thereby, in effect, removed. For that unity then stands wholly alien and adventitious to the nature of things, and cannot be cognized from their universal laws either. And so there springs up a vicious circle in the proof, inasmuch as one takes as given the very thing that was supposed to be proved.

To mistake the regulative principle of nature's systematic unity for a constitutive one, and to set up hypostatically, as a cause, that which is placed at the base solely in the idea for reason's concordant use, is nothing else than to throw reason into confusion. Investigation of nature holds to its course entirely on its own, following the chain of natural causes by their universal laws—guided, to be sure, by the idea of an author, yet not so as to derive from him the purposiveness it everywhere pursues, but so as to cognize his existence out of that purposiveness, sought as it is within the essences of natural things, and, where feasible, within the essences of all things whatever, and thus as absolutely necessary. Whether that last should succeed or not, the idea stays correct throughout, and its use no less so, provided the use has been kept within the bounds of a merely regulative principle.

Purposive unity in its completeness is perfection (regarded without qualification). Supposing we fail to locate this within the essence of those things that constitute the whole object of experience—the whole, that is, of all cognition of ours that holds objectively—and so within universal and necessary laws of nature, how are we to draw from that, of all things, the idea of a supreme and unconditionally necessary perfection belonging to an original being that is the fountainhead of all causality? The greatest systematic unity, and with it the purposive unity as well, is the training-ground—indeed the very ground of possibility—for the fullest exercise of human reason. Its idea, then, is knit indissolubly to the very essence of our reason. This same idea is therefore lawgiving for us, and it is only natural to posit a lawgiving reason answering to it (intellectus archetypus), the source from which every systematic unity of nature, as our reason's object, must be derived.

In connection with the Antinomy of Pure Reason we remarked that every question pure reason raises must admit of an unqualified answer, and that the plea of our cognition's boundaries—a plea that in many a question about nature is no less inevitable than warranted—can find no admission here, since the questions set before us here proceed not from the nature of things but purely from the nature of reason, and bear on nothing beyond its own inner constitution. We are now able to make good this claim—bold though it appears at first sight—as regards the two questions on which pure reason's interest is greatest, and thereby to carry our reflection on its dialectic through to complete conclusion.

So if one asks (with an eye to a transcendental theology)⁶⁷, first, whether there exists anything set apart from the world that holds the ground of the world's order and of its interconnection under universal laws, the reply runs: beyond doubt. For the world amounts to a sum of appearances, and so some ground of it must exist that is transcendental—thinkable, that is, for the pure understanding alone. If, second, the question runs whether this being is a substance, possessed of the greatest reality, necessary, and so on: then my answer is that the question is wholly without significance. For all the categories by which I attempt to frame for myself a concept of an object of that sort are of no use but the empirical, and are utterly without sense unless brought to bear on objects of possible experience—on the sensible world, that is. Away from this field they are but labels for concepts, which one might concede, yet by which nothing whatever can be understood. If, third and last, the question runs whether we may not at any rate conceive this being, set apart from the world, on an analogy with objects of experience: then the reply is yes, indeed, but only as an object within the idea, not within reality—that is, only so far as it constitutes a substratum, unknown to us, of the systematic unity, the order, and the purposiveness of the world's constitution, a substratum reason is bound to adopt as the regulative principle of its investigation of nature. More than that, within this idea we may grant—unabashed and beyond reproach—certain anthropomorphisms conducive to the regulative principle just spoken of. For at bottom it is never more than an idea, one referred not straight to a being set apart from the world at all, but to the regulative principle of the world's systematic unity—and even this only by way of a schema of that principle, namely a supreme intelligence that, on wise designs, is the author of the said unity. What this primordial ground of the world's unity might be in itself was never to be thought through the idea; only how we are to employ it—or rather its idea—relatively to reason's systematic use regarding the world's things.

In this manner, though (the questioning will press on), can we, after all is said, take for granted a single, wise, and omnipotent author of the world? Without a shadow of doubt; and not this alone—we must lay down such a one as a presupposition. But in that manner, surely, we broaden our cognition past the field of possible experience? By no means. For what we have laid down is merely a something whose intrinsic nature is wholly beyond our concept (a purely transcendental object); but with a view to the systematic, purposive order of the world's fabric—an order we are obliged to presuppose whenever we make a study of nature—we have conceived that being, unknown to us, solely by analogy with an intelligence (an empirical concept); which is to say, in respect of the ends and the perfection resting upon it, we have equipped it with just those properties that, under the conditions of our reason, are able to contain the ground of a systematic unity of that kind. This idea, accordingly, rests wholly on a footing relative to the world-directed use of our reason. Were we, however, to confer objective validity on it outright, we should lose sight of the fact that what we are thinking is nothing but a being in the idea; and by setting out then from a ground not determinable in the slightest through any contemplation of the world, we should thereby be rendered incapable of applying this principle in a manner suited to reason's empirical use.

But (the further question will come) can I, in this fashion, put to use the concept and the presupposition of a highest being when I contemplate the world rationally? Yes—that, in truth, is the very end for which reason laid this idea at the base. Yet am I now permitted to regard purpose-like arrangements as intentions, deriving them, though by way of special predispositions set up for this within the world, from the divine will? Yes, that too you may do, but in such a manner that it must come to the same for you whether someone declares that divine wisdom has disposed all things thus toward its highest ends, or that the idea of highest wisdom is a regulative for probing nature and a principle of nature's systematic, purposive unity under universal natural laws—even where those ends escape our notice; that is, wherever you do notice it, it must be a matter of complete indifference to you to say: God willed it so in his wisdom, or nature ordered it so with equal wisdom. For that greatest systematic, purposive unity which your reason called for as the regulative principle underlying all study of nature was the very thing that gave you the right to lay the idea of a highest intelligence at the base as a schema of that regulative principle; and however much purposiveness in the world you then meet with in keeping with it, so much confirmation do you have of your idea's rightfulness; but since the principle in question aimed at nothing else than to seek out a necessary and largest attainable unity of nature, we shall indeed, to the extent that we reach it, owe that unity to the idea of a highest being, and yet we cannot—without landing in contradiction with our own selves—pass over the universal laws of nature, with a view to which alone the idea was laid down at the base, so as to regard nature's purposiveness as contingent and, in its origin, hyperphysical, seeing that we were never entitled to assume a being over nature endowed with the properties in question, but only to place its idea at the base, in order, on the analogy of a causal determination, to regard the appearances as bound together systematically among themselves.

For this same reason we are likewise entitled to conceive the world-cause, within the idea, not merely on a more refined anthropomorphism (apart from which nothing at all of it could be conceived)—namely as a being endowed with understanding, with liking and disliking, and, to match, with a corresponding appetite and will, and so on—but rather to invest it with an infinite perfection, one that thereby reaches far past whatever the empirical acquaintance with the world's order could entitle us to. For what the regulative law of systematic unity demands is that we should study nature as though a systematic, purposive unity, joined to the greatest possible manifoldness, were to be met with everywhere, on and on without end. For although we shall spy out, or lay hold of, but little of this perfection of the world, it belongs nonetheless to our reason's legislation to hunt for it, and surmise it, on every side; and to carry on the study of nature by this principle must always work to our advantage and can at no time turn to our detriment. Yet under this representation of the idea of a highest author taken as basis, it is likewise clear that what I lay at the base is neither the existence nor the knowledge of such a being, but only the idea of it, and hence that I derive, in strictness, nothing from this being, but only from its idea—which is to say, from the nature of the world's things, as construed on an idea of this sort. There seems, moreover, to be a certain consciousness—undeveloped though it be—of the authentic use of this concept of reason of ours that has prompted the modest and equitable idiom of philosophers in every age, when they speak of nature's wisdom and forethought and of divine wisdom as interchangeable expressions, and indeed give the former expression preference, so long as it is merely speculative reason that is in play, because it reins in the presumption of a claim greater than any we have warrant to make, and at once directs reason homeward to the field peculiarly its own, nature.

So it is that pure reason—which at the outset appeared to hold out to us nothing short of an extension of knowledge past every boundary of experience—contains, once we grasp it aright, nothing but regulative principles that do, to be sure, prescribe a unity greater than the understanding's empirical use can reach, and yet, precisely by displacing so far outward the goal of that use's approximation , raise its accord with itself, through systematic unity, to the highest pitch—whereas, should one misconstrue them and take them for constitutive principles of transcendent cognitions, they beget, by an illusion at once dazzling and deceptive, persuasion and a knowledge merely imagined, and with these unending contradictions and quarrels.

Thus every cognition of the human sort takes its start from intuitions, moves on from these to concepts, and terminates in ideas. Granted that, in respect of all three of these elements, it commands sources of cognition a priori which at a first look seem to hold in contempt the bounds of all experience, still a critique carried to completion carries the conviction that no reason, in speculative use, can with these elements ever pass out beyond the field of possible experience, and that the true vocation of this supreme faculty of cognition consists in availing itself of all its methods and their principles for one purpose only—to trace nature into its innermost depths along every possible principle of unity, of which the principle of ends is the most eminent—but never to soar past its limit, outside of which, for us, there is nothing save vacant space. The critical scrutiny, in the Transcendental Analytic, of every proposition capable of stretching our cognition past actual experience has, it is true, satisfied us sufficiently that such propositions can conduct us to nothing beyond a possible experience; and had we not been mistrustful even toward the plainest of abstract and universal doctrines, had no alluring and plausible vistas tempted us to fling off the discipline of the former, we might well have been excused the wearisome cross-examination of all those dialectical witnesses whom a transcendent reason parades in furtherance of its pretensions; for we knew beforehand already, with entire certainty, that all its professions, honestly meant though they might perhaps be, could not but be flatly void, since they touched upon an intelligence no human being is ever able to come by. But because talk finds no end so long as one fails to reach behind the true cause of the illusion by which even the most rational may be taken in, and because the resolving of all our transcendent cognition into its constituent elements (as an inquiry into our own inner nature) is of no slight worth in itself, and is for the philosopher a positive duty besides, it was necessary not merely to track this entire, albeit fruitless, labor of speculative reason back in detail to its earliest springs; rather, since the dialectical illusion here is not deceptive to the judgment alone, but, given the interest one takes here in the judgment, is enticing and forever natural—and will so continue for all time to come—it was advisable to draw up, as it were, a full record of these proceedings and to lodge it in the archive of human reason as a safeguard against errors of a like kind in time to come.

II. Transcendental Doctrine of Method

Introduction

If I view the entire stock of cognition belonging to pure and speculative reason as a building, of which we do at least carry the idea within ourselves, then I can say this: in the transcendental Doctrine of Elements we took stock of the building materials and settled for what sort of edifice, and of what height and solidity, they would be sufficient. It turned out, admittedly, that although we had had a tower in view, one designed to reach up to heaven, the stock of materials was only enough for a dwelling-house — one just roomy and high enough for our affairs on the plane of experience to take them in; but that this bold venture was destined to fail for want of material, and this without even reckoning the confusion of tongues that could not but divide the workmen over the plan and disperse them throughout the world, each to build separately, following his own draft. Now what matters to us is not so much the materials as, rather, the plan itself, and though we have been cautioned against risking any arbitrary, blind draft that might well surpass our entire means, yet, being unable properly to abstain from raising a secure place of residence, we must frame our estimate for a building in keeping with the stock supplied to us and, at once, matched to what we require.

By the transcendental Doctrine of Method, then, I mean the determination of the formal conditions of a complete system of pure reason. For this purpose we shall be occupied with a discipline, a canon, an architectonic, and lastly a history of pure reason, and shall achieve, from a transcendental standpoint, what has been pursued in the schools under the title of a practical logic concerning the employment of the understanding as such, though poorly achieved, because, since general logic is not confined to any special sort of cognition of the understanding (not, for instance, to pure cognition), nor to any particular objects, it can, without drawing on knowledge borrowed from other sciences, do nothing more than put forward headings for possible methods together with technical terms of the kind used, in matters of systematic arrangement, across all manner of sciences — terms that make the names known to the apprentice beforehand, whose sense and use he is destined only afterwards to learn.

Chapter 1. The Discipline of Pure Reason

Negative judgments — those that are negative not merely in their logical form but also in their content — enjoy little particular esteem in the eyes of human curiosity; indeed they are often regarded as envious enemies of our drive for cognition, which strives unceasingly toward expansion, and it takes almost an apology to secure for them so much as toleration, and still more to secure for them favor and high regard.

To be sure, one can express logically any proposition one wishes in negative form, yet as concerns the content of our cognition as such — whether a judgment enlarges or limits it — the negating ones have the peculiar office of doing nothing but warding off error. Hence negative propositions designed to fend off a false cognition in a case where no error is ever possible are, though perfectly true, still empty — that is, not at all suited to their aim, and for precisely that reason frequently absurd; as with that rhetorician's dictum in the schools, that Alexander would have been unable to conquer any territory had he possessed no army.

Wherever, though, the bounds of the cognition available to us are exceedingly narrow, the temptation to judge strong, the semblance on offer highly deceptive, and the damage done by error substantial, there the negative side of instruction — which serves solely to secure us against errors — has still greater weight than many a positive lesson by which our cognition might be enlarged. We give the name discipline to the constraint by which the abiding inclination to stray from certain rules is held in check and at last stamped out. It is distinct from culture, which is meant merely to impart a skill without thereby removing another one already present. To the cultivation of a talent that already has of itself an impulse toward expression, discipline will therefore make a negative⁶⁸ contribution, whereas culture and doctrine make a positive one.

That temperament, and likewise that talents which readily allow themselves a free and unrestricted movement (such as imagination and wit), stand in need of a discipline in more than one respect, everyone will readily grant. That reason, however, whose proper task it is to prescribe its discipline to all other endeavors, should itself still require one, may indeed seem strange; and in fact it has thus far escaped such a humiliation precisely because, given the solemnity and the thorough decorum with which it comes forward, no one could easily fall into suspecting it of a frivolous play with figments in place of concepts and words in place of things.

Reason requires no critique in its empirical use, because there its principles are subjected, on the touchstone of experience, to continual testing ; and likewise none in mathematics, where its concepts must at once be exhibited in concreto in pure intuition, so that everything groundless and arbitrary at once becomes manifest. But wherever reason is held on no visible course by intuition, whether empirical or pure — that is, in its transcendental employment operating on concepts alone — its need for a discipline becomes so acute, one that would curb its bent toward extending itself past the cramped confines of possible experience and restrain it from excess and error, that the whole philosophy of pure reason is occupied with nothing beyond this negative usefulness. Isolated aberrations admit of correction by censure , and the sources from which they spring by critique. Where, however, one meets — as happens in pure reason — with a whole system of illusions and deceptive semblances that are tightly bound up with one another and drawn together under shared principles, there a wholly peculiar and indeed negative legislation appears to be called for, one that, under the title of a discipline, would raise up, from the very nature of reason and of the objects of its pure use, something like a system of circumspection and self-scrutiny, before which no fallacious, sophistical semblance could survive but would at once give itself away, whatever grounds it might muster to gloss itself over.

It should, however, be well noted that within this second principal part of the transcendental critique I aim the discipline of pure reason not at the content but solely at the method of cognition drawn from pure reason. The former was already accomplished in the Doctrine of Elements. Yet the exercise of reason bears so much resemblance to itself, no matter which object it is brought to bear upon, and is nonetheless, insofar as it is meant to be transcendental, at the same time so essentially set apart from everything else, that without the admonitory negative teaching of a discipline established expressly for it there is no averting the errors that must inevitably issue from an unfitting compliance with methods which do suit reason elsewhere, only not here.

Section 1. The discipline of pure reason in its dogmatic use

Mathematics affords the most dazzling instance of a pure reason that, with no help from experience, successfully broadens its own scope. Instances of this sort prove infectious, especially for a faculty that, by its nature, cannot help expecting the same good fortune elsewhere that it once met with in a single case. And so pure reason, when put to transcendental use, cherishes the hope of expanding itself with equal success and rigor as it did in mathematics—chiefly by carrying over the very method that yielded such palpable benefit in the one domain. A great deal therefore hangs, for us, on knowing this: whether the method of attaining apodictic certainty that the latter science calls mathematical is one and the same as that by which such certainty is pursued in philosophy, where it would have to bear the name dogmatic.

Philosophical cognition amounts to rational cognition from concepts, whereas the mathematical sort issues from the construction of concepts. To construct a concept, however, means this: to display a priori the intuition that answers to it. Constructing a concept thus calls for a non-empirical intuition, one that—being an intuition—is a single object, and which yet, precisely as the construction of a concept (of a general representation), has to convey in the representation a validity holding for every possible intuition ranged under that same concept. So it is that I construct a triangle when I display the object answering to this concept, whether through sheer imagination in pure intuition or, thereafter, on paper in empirical intuition too, on both occasions wholly a priori, having borrowed the model for it from no experience whatever. The single figure I have drawn is empirical, and serves all the same to convey the concept unimpaired in its generality, for in this empirical intuition one looks solely to the act of constructing the concept—an act to which numerous determinations, such as those of size, of the sides and of the angles, are wholly indifferent—so that one leaves out of account these variations, which do nothing to alter the concept of the triangle.

Philosophical cognition, then, regards the particular only within the universal, while mathematical cognition regards the universal within the particular, indeed within the single instance, and does so nonetheless a priori and by the agency of reason, so that, exactly as this single instance stands determined under certain general conditions of construction, the object of the concept—answered to by this instance merely as its schema—must likewise be conceived as determined in general.

The essential contrast between these two species of rational cognition lies, then, in this form, and by no means in any difference of their matter or their objects. Those who fancied that philosophy could be set apart from mathematics by declaring that the one takes for its object merely quality, the other merely quantity, have mistaken an effect for a cause. It is the form of mathematical cognition that causes it to reach only as far as quanta. For construction is possible for the concept of magnitudes alone—that is, a priori laying-out in intuition—whereas qualities allow of presentation in no intuition save an empirical one. A rational cognition of qualities is on that account possible through concepts only. Thus an intuition answering to the concept of reality can be drawn by no one from any source other than experience, and can never be come by a priori, from oneself, ahead of the empirical consciousness of it. The conical figure one will be able to render intuitive with no empirical help, simply by following the concept, but the color of this cone must first be furnished in some experience or other. As for the concept of a cause as such, I have no means of presenting it in intuition except by an example that experience puts into my hand, and so forth. Philosophy, besides, treats of magnitudes no less than mathematics does—of totality, say, of infinity, and so on. Mathematics likewise busies itself with the distinction between lines and surfaces as spaces of differing quality, and with the continuity of extension as one such quality of it. Yet though in cases like these the two share a common object, the way of handling it by reason turns out wholly different under philosophical as against mathematical treatment. The one confines itself to general concepts; the other can get nowhere with the mere concept and rushes forthwith to intuition, where it inspects the concept in concreto—not empirically, though, but only in an intuition it has displayed a priori, that is, constructed, and in which whatever issues from the general conditions of construction must hold likewise, and generally, of the object of the constructed concept.

Hand a philosopher the concept of a triangle and leave him to work out, after his own fashion, how the sum of its angles might come to stand toward a right angle. All he now possesses is the concept of a figure shut in by three straight lines, and along with it the concept of an equal number of angles. He may brood over this concept as long as he pleases, he will draw nothing new from it. He can take apart the concept of the straight line, or of an angle, or of the number three, and make it distinct, without ever reaching further properties that simply do not reside in these concepts. Let the geometer, by contrast, take the question up. He starts straightaway by constructing a triangle. Knowing that two right angles come, taken together, to exactly the sum of all the adjacent angles that may be drawn from a single point on a straight line, he prolongs one side of his triangle and gets two adjacent angles equal together to two right ones. He then divides the outer of these angles by running a line parallel to the triangle's opposite side, and observes that an outer adjacent angle here comes about which equals an inner one, and so forth. By such means, along a chain of inferences forever steered by intuition, he reaches a fully luminous and at once general resolution of the question.

Mathematics, though, constructs not magnitudes alone (quanta), as geometry does, but bare magnitude as well (quantitatem), as in algebra, where it leaves wholly aside the makeup of the object meant to be thought under such a concept of magnitude. It then settles on a particular notation for all constructions of magnitudes as such (numbers)—for addition, subtraction, and so on, and the extraction of roots; and once it has, in addition, marked out the general concept of magnitudes according to their several relations, it sets forth in intuition, under certain general rules, every operation by which magnitude is produced and modified; where one magnitude is to be divided by another, it brings their two characters together according to the notation for division, and so forth, and thereby attains, through a symbolic construction—just as geometry does through an ostensive or geometric one (of the objects themselves)—the very point beyond the reach of discursive cognition working with mere concepts.

What can be the cause of so divergent a predicament in which two artificers of reason find themselves, the one taking his route by concepts, the other by intuitions that he displays a priori in keeping with concepts? Given the transcendental groundwork laid out above, the cause is plain. The matter here does not turn on analytic propositions, producible by mere dissection of concepts (on this score the philosopher would surely outdo his competitor), but on synthetic ones—and, at that, such as are to be cognized a priori. For I am not to attend to what I really think in my concept of the triangle (that is nothing but the bare definition); I am, rather, to press past it toward properties that lie outside this concept and yet pertain to it. Now, this cannot happen otherwise than by my fixing my object according to the conditions either of empirical or of pure intuition. The first would supply only an empirical proposition (got by measuring its angles), one carrying neither generality nor, still less, necessity—and there is no talk of anything of that kind. The second procedure, however, is the mathematical, and in this case the geometric, construction, whereby, in a pure intuition as much as in an empirical one, I annex the manifold belonging to the schema of a triangle as such, and hence to its concept—by which means general synthetic propositions must indeed be constructed.

I would therefore be philosophizing about the triangle to no purpose—reflecting, that is, discursively upon it—without getting the least bit past that bare definition from which, in fairness, I should have to set out. There does exist a transcendental synthesis out of concepts alone, which once again is the philosopher's alone to accomplish, yet which bears never on more than a thing in general, and on the conditions under which a perception of it might belong to possible experience. But in mathematical tasks that is not in question, nor is existence at all; what is in question is the properties of the objects in themselves, and this only so far as those properties are bound up with the concept of them.

In the instance cited we have aimed merely at making plain how vast a difference lies between the discursive employment of reason by concepts and the intuitive employment through the construction of concepts. The question naturally follows what the cause may be that renders such a twofold employment of reason necessary, and on what conditions one is able to tell whether the first alone, or the second as well, has a place.

In the end, every cognition of ours bears on possible intuitions; for it is by these alone that an object gets given. Now an a priori concept (a non-empirical concept) either already carries a pure intuition within itself, and is then open to construction; or it carries nothing beyond the synthesis of possible intuitions not given a priori, and then one may indeed judge by its means synthetically and a priori, though only discursively, by concepts, and never intuitively, through construction of the concept.

Now, of all intuition, the sole thing given a priori is the naked form of appearances—space and time; and a concept of these, taken as quanta, admits of a priori display in intuition, that is, of construction, whether alongside their quality (their shape) or else as their mere quantity (the bare synthesis of the homogeneous manifold) by way of number. The matter of appearances, though—that through which things come to be given us in space and time—is representable in perception only, and hence a posteriori. The one concept that presents a priori this empirical content of appearances is the concept of the thing as such; and synthetic cognition of it a priori is competent to supply no more than the bare rule for synthesizing whatever perception may hand over a posteriori—never the a priori intuition of the real object, since that intuition has of necessity to be empirical.

Synthetic propositions directed upon things as such, whose intuition cannot be furnished a priori at all, are transcendental. Transcendental propositions, accordingly, admit of being furnished never by construction of concepts, but only by concepts a priori. They hold no more than the rule under which a certain synthetic unity of what cannot be a priori presented in intuition (of the perceptions) is to be pursued empirically. But not a single one of their concepts can they display a priori in any case whatever; this they accomplish only a posteriori, by way of the experience that first grows possible in keeping with those synthetic principles.

If one is to pass a synthetic judgment about a concept, one has to step out of that concept and, indeed, toward the intuition in which it stands given. For should one keep to what the concept holds, the judgment would be merely analytic, an unpacking of the thought in line with what actually lies inside it. But from the concept I am free to move to the pure or empirical intuition that answers to it, so as to weigh it there in concreto and, whether a priori or a posteriori, to learn what belongs to its object. The first is the rational and mathematical cognition by construction of the concept; the second is the merely empirical (mechanical) cognition, one incapable of ever delivering necessary and apodictic propositions. So I might well dissect my empirical concept of gold and thereby win nothing beyond the power to count off all that I really think at this word—by which my cognition undergoes, to be sure, a logical betterment, but takes on no increase or addition. What I do instead is take the matter that turns up under this name and run perceptions upon it, and these will hand me a variety of synthetic, yet empirical, propositions. The mathematical concept of a triangle I would construct—give it, that is, a priori in intuition—and along this road arrive at a synthetic, yet rational, cognition. But once the transcendental concept of a reality, a substance, a force, and the like is handed me, it marks out neither an empirical nor a pure intuition, but solely the synthesis of empirical intuitions (which for that reason cannot be furnished a priori); and so, since the synthesis is unable to pass a priori out to the intuition answering to it, there can spring from that concept no determining synthetic proposition, but only a principle for the synthesis⁶⁹ of possible empirical intuitions. A transcendental proposition is thus a synthetic rational cognition by mere concepts, and therefore discursive, since through it all synthetic unity of empirical cognition first grows possible, while by it no intuition whatever gets given a priori.

There is, then, a twofold employment of reason which—for all the generality of cognition and its a priori generation that the two hold in common—runs nonetheless very differently in its course, and this for the reason that within appearance, as that whereby every object comes to be given us, two ingredients are present: the form of intuition (space and time), open to being cognized and settled entirely a priori, and the matter (the physical), or the content, standing for a something encountered in space and time, one that consequently harbors an existence and answers to sensation. Touching the latter—which admits of determinate givenness by no route but the empirical—there is nothing we can hold a priori save indeterminate concepts for the synthesis of possible sensations, so far as these come under the unity of apperception (within a possible experience). Touching the former, we are able to settle our concepts in intuition a priori by fashioning for ourselves, in space and time, the very objects, through a uniform synthesis, in that we take them for nothing but quanta. The first is termed the employment of reason by concepts, wherein all we can do is bring appearances, as to their real content, under concepts—concepts thereupon determinable in no way but the empirical, that is, a posteriori (though in keeping with those concepts as rules of an empirical synthesis); the second is the employment of reason through construction of concepts, wherein these concepts, bearing already on an a priori intuition, can just for that reason be given as settled a priori, and without any empirical data, in pure intuition. To ponder everything that is there (a thing in space or in time)—whether, and how far, it is a quantum or not; that an existence in it, or else a lack, has to be represented; how far this something (the filler of space or time) is a primary substratum or a mere determination; whether its existence bears a relation to something else as cause or as effect; and, finally, whether, in point of existence, it stands isolated or in mutual dependence with others; to ponder the possibility of this existence, its actuality and its necessity, or the reverse of these: the whole of this pertains to rational cognition from concepts, and it is this we call philosophical. But to settle an intuition a priori in space (shape), to partition time (duration), or just to cognize what is common to the synthesis of one selfsame thing throughout time and space, together with the magnitude of an intuition in general that springs therefrom (number)—that is a business of reason by construction of concepts, and bears the name mathematical.

The signal good fortune that reason meets with by means of mathematics quite naturally breeds the surmise that, if not reason itself, at any rate its method will succeed outside the province of magnitudes as well, inasmuch as it reduces all its concepts to intuitions it can furnish a priori, thereby making itself, so to speak, lord over nature: pure philosophy, on the other hand, fumbles about within nature with discursive a priori concepts, unable to render the reality of them a priori intuitive and thus to warrant it. Nor, indeed, do the masters of this art seem to want for such confidence in themselves, nor the public to want for high hopes of their skill, were they ever to set their hand to the business. For, having hardly ever philosophized about their mathematics (a hard task, that!), the specific difference of the one employment of reason from the other never so much as crosses their mind. Current rules, empirically applied and borrowed from common reason, then serve them in the stead of axioms. Whence the concepts of space and time, with which they deal (as the sole original quanta), may arise concerns them not at all; and just so it strikes them as idle to inquire into the source of pure concepts of the understanding, and thereby into the compass of their validity, and preferable simply to put them to use. In all of this they act entirely rightly, provided only that they do not step beyond their allotted bound, namely that of nature. But so doing, they slip unawares off the field of sensibility onto the treacherous soil of pure and even transcendental concepts, where the ground (instabilis tellus, innabilis unda) suffers them neither to stand nor to swim, and lets only hurried steps be taken, of which time retains not the faintest trace—whereas their march in mathematics lays down a highroad that even the remotest posterity may tread in confidence.

Since we have laid it on ourselves as a duty to fix the bounds of pure reason in its transcendental use exactly and with certainty, while this species of striving carries the peculiarity that, for all the most forceful and lucid warnings, it still lets itself be kept in play by hope before it wholly renounces the design of pressing out beyond the bounds of experience into the enchanting tracts of the intellectual: it becomes necessary to strip away, as it were, this last anchor of a fanciful hope, and to show that adherence to the mathematical method can, in this species of cognition, procure not the slightest gain—unless the gain be that of laying open the bare spots of that method the more distinctly: that geometry and philosophy are two wholly separate things, however much, in natural science, they reach a hand to one another, so that the procedure of the one can never be aped by the other.

The soundness of mathematics rests upon definitions, axioms, and demonstrations. I shall be content to show this: that not one of these components can, in the sense the mathematician gives them, be furnished by philosophy, nor aped by it; that the geometer, working by his method within philosophy, brings off nothing but houses of cards, while the philosopher, working by his within the domain of mathematics, can raise nothing but idle prattle—although just this, the knowing of one's bounds, is what philosophy consists in—and that even the mathematician, unless his talent be already hemmed in by nature and penned within his specialty, can neither spurn philosophy's warnings nor override them.

1. On definitions. To define ought, as the very word conveys, to signify strictly no more than to lay out originally, within its bounds, the comprehensive concept of a thing.⁷⁰ Set against such a requirement, an empirical concept cannot be defined in the least, but only explicated. For, since in it we hold but a handful of marks belonging to some class of sense-objects, one can never be sure whether, under the word that stands for the same object, one thinks now more, now fewer of its marks . So the one may think, in the concept of gold, over and above weight, color, and ductility, the further property of not rusting, while the other perhaps knows nothing of it. One relies on certain marks only so long as they suffice for telling things apart; fresh observations, though, strike some out and put others in, so that the concept never rests between secure bounds. And what, besides, would be the use of defining such a concept, seeing that when, say, water and its properties come up for discussion, one will not dwell on what one thinks at the word water, but will move on to trials, and the word, with the scant marks clinging to it, is meant to make up merely a designation and not a concept of the thing—so that the supposed definition is nothing other than a settling of the word. Secondly, no a priori given concept, either, can strictly speaking be defined—substance, say, cause, right, equity, and the rest. For I can never rest assured that the distinct representation of a concept given (as yet confusedly) has been comprehensively developed, unless I know it to be adequate to the object. But since the concept of it, as it comes given, may hold many an obscure representation that we skip over in the dissecting, though we draw on them always in application: the comprehensiveness of my concept's dissection stays forever in doubt, and can be rendered only presumably, never apodictically, certain by way of manifold matching examples. In place of the term definition I would sooner press into service that of exposition, which stays cautious yet, and by which the critic may let the thing pass to a certain degree and still keep his misgivings as to its comprehensiveness. Since, then, concepts given neither empirically nor a priori lend themselves to definition, there are left over none but concepts thought up at will, on which one may try this trick. A concept of my own I can, in such a case, always define; for I must, after all, know what I meant to think, having myself devised it on purpose, with its coming to me neither by the nature of the understanding nor by experience—yet I cannot claim to have thereby defined a genuine object. For if the concept rests on empirical conditions—a ship's clock, say—then this arbitrary concept does not yet yield the object and its possibility; from it I do not so much as know whether it has any object at all, and my account may better be styled a declaration (of my project) than the definition of an object. Hence there would be left over no concepts fit for defining but those holding an arbitrary synthesis constructible a priori—so that mathematics, and it alone, has definitions. For the object it thinks, it also sets forth a priori in intuition, and this object can surely contain no more and no less than the concept, since through the account the concept of the object was given originally—that is, without the account's being drawn from anything else. The German tongue has, for the terms exposition, explication, declaration, and definition, nothing beyond the single word Erklärung; and so we must already give a little ground on the stringency of the requirement—having, that is, refused philosophical accounts the honorific of definition—and will hold this whole remark to the point that philosophical definitions come about only as expositions of given concepts, mathematical ones as constructions of concepts originally made, the former merely analytically, by dissection (whose completeness is not apodictically sure), the latter synthetically, and thus make the concept itself, whereas the former only explain it. From this there follows:

a) that one must not, in philosophy, ape mathematics by putting the definitions out in front, except perhaps by way of a mere trial. For, being dissections of given concepts, these concepts go before—confusedly still, but they go before—and the incomplete exposition precedes the complete, so that from a few marks drawn out of a dissection not yet finished we can settle a good deal in advance, before we have come to the complete exposition, that is, to the definition; in short, in philosophy the definition, as apportioned distinctness, ought to close the work sooner than open it.⁷¹ In mathematics, on the contrary, we have no concept whatever ahead of the definition, through which the concept is first given; it must, then, and it can too, always take its start from there.

b) Mathematical definitions can never go wrong. For, because the concept is first given through the definition, it holds exactly, and only, what the definition means to have thought by its means. But although nothing false, as to content, can arise in it, still, now and then—though rarely—a slip in the form (the dress) may occur, namely in point of precision. Thus the ordinary account of the circle, that it is a curved line all of whose points stand at equal distance from a single one (the center), carries the fault that the qualifier curved has crept in without need. For there has to be a particular theorem, drawn from the definition and readily proved: that any line all of whose points stand at equal distance from a single one is curved (no stretch of it straight). Analytic definitions, by contrast, can go wrong in manifold ways—either by importing marks that in truth did not lie in the concept, or by falling short of the comprehensiveness that makes up the essence of a definition, since one cannot be quite so sure of the completeness of one's dissection. For this reason mathematics' way of defining is not to be aped in philosophy.

2. On axioms. These are synthetic principles a priori, in so far as they are immediately certain. Now one concept does not admit of being joined to another synthetically and yet immediately, since, for us to get past a concept, a third, mediating cognition is wanted. And since philosophy is nothing but rational cognition by concepts, no principle will be met with in it that might earn the name of an axiom. Mathematics, on the other hand, has room for axioms, since, by constructing its concepts in the intuition of the object, it is able to tie that object's predicates to it a priori and immediately, as, for instance, that three points always lie in a single plane. A synthetic principle from bare concepts, by contrast, can never be immediately certain—take the proposition: whatever happens has its cause; for I have to cast about for a third thing, namely the condition of time-determination within an experience, and could not recognize such a principle straight off, immediately from the concepts alone. Discursive principles, then, are something altogether other than intuitive ones, that is, axioms. The former call, every time, for a deduction besides, which the latter can do wholly without; and since these last are self-evident on the very ground that philosophical principles, for all their certainty, can never lay claim to, it wants a very great deal for any synthetic proposition of pure and transcendental reason to be as manifest (as the defiant phrase runs) as the proposition that twice two make four. True, in the Analytic, at the table of the principles of the pure understanding, I did also bring in certain axioms of intuition; but the principle cited there was itself no axiom, and served merely to state the Principium of the possibility of axioms in general—and is itself only a principle from concepts. For the very possibility of mathematics has to be shown within transcendental philosophy. Philosophy, therefore, has no axioms, and may never lay down its a priori principles thus flatly, but has to make do with vindicating its warrant for them by thorough deduction.

3. On demonstrations. Only an apodictic proof, so far as it is intuitive, can be styled a demonstration. Experience does teach us what is there, but not that it could be in no way otherwise. On that account empirical grounds of proof can supply no apodictic proof. Out of a priori concepts, however (in discursive cognition), intuitive certainty—that is, self-evidence—can never spring, however apodictically certain the judgment may otherwise stand. It is mathematics alone, then, that holds demonstrations, since it draws its cognition not from concepts but from the construction of them—that is, from the intuition furnishable a priori to match the concepts. Even the way of algebra, with its equations, out of which it turns up the truth by reduction along with the proof, is admittedly no geometric but still a characteristic construction, in which one lays out at the signs the concepts—above all that of the ratio of magnitudes—in intuition, and, with never a glance at the heuristic side, secures every inference against error by setting each one before the eye. Philosophical cognition, on the contrary, must forgo this advantage, having always to view the general in abstracto (through concepts), whereas mathematics can weigh the general in concreto (in the single intuition) and yet by a pure a priori representation, whereby each false step shows itself. The former, accordingly, I would rather name acroamatic (discursive) proofs, since they can be conducted through nothing but words (the object in thought), as opposed to demonstrations, which, as the term itself already signals, go forward in the intuition of the object.

From all of this it now follows that it in no way suits the nature of philosophy, above all in the field of pure reason, to swagger with a dogmatic bearing and to trick itself out in the titles and sashes of mathematics, into whose order it does not, after all, belong—though it has every ground to hope for a sisterly bond with it. Those are hollow presumptions that can never come off, and must indeed thwart their own aim, which is to expose the illusions of a reason that misjudges its bounds and, by a sufficient clearing-up of our concepts, to bring the self-conceit of speculation back down to a modest but sound self-knowledge. Reason, then, in its transcendental ventures, will not be able to gaze ahead so assured, as though the road it has covered ran quite straight to the goal, nor to reckon so boldly on the premises it has laid at bottom that there were no need to look back time and again and mind whether, as the inferences run on, there might not turn up errors overlooked in the principles—errors making it needful either to fix them more closely or to recast them altogether.

I sort all apodictic propositions (be they now provable or immediately certain) into dogmata and mathemata. A directly synthetic proposition from concepts is a dogma; a like proposition through construction of concepts, on the other hand, is a mathema. Analytic judgments, strictly, teach us nothing further about the object than what the concept we hold of it already carries within it, since they do not widen the cognition past the concept of the subject but merely light it up. They cannot, therefore, aptly be styled dogmas (a word one might perhaps render by tenets). But of the two sorts of synthetic proposition a priori just considered, ordinary usage lets only those belonging to philosophical cognition carry this name, and one would scarcely call the propositions of arithmetic or of geometry dogmata. This usage thus bears out the account we gave, that only judgments from concepts, and not those from construction of concepts, may be styled dogmatic.

Now the whole of pure reason, in its merely speculative use, holds not one directly synthetic judgment from concepts. For by way of ideas it is, as we have shown, capable of no synthetic judgments at all that would carry objective validity; by way of concepts of the understanding, on the other hand, it does raise secure principles, yet in no way directly from concepts—always only indirectly, by referring these concepts to something wholly contingent, namely possible experience; for then, once this (something as an object of possible experiences) is presupposed, they are apodictically certain right enough, though in themselves (directly) a priori they cannot so much as be cognized. Thus no one can soundly see into the proposition: whatever happens has its cause, out of these given concepts alone. Hence it is no dogma, even though from another vantage—namely the sole field of its possible use, that is, experience—it admits of being proved perfectly well and apodictically. It is styled a principle and not a theorem, even though it must be proved, and this because it has the singular property of itself first making possible its own ground of proof, namely experience, and of having always to be presupposed in the latter.

If, then, in the speculative use of pure reason there are, as to content, no dogmata whatever, every dogmatic method—be it borrowed from the mathematician or meant to grow into a manner of its own—is unfitting in itself. For it does no more than veil the faults and blunders and beguile philosophy, whose true aim is to let all reason's steps be seen in their brightest light. The method may, for all that, still be systematic. For our reason (subjectively) is itself a system, though in its pure use, by way of bare concepts, only a system of inquiry after principles of unity, for which experience alone is in a position to yield the stuff. Of the peculiar method of a transcendental philosophy, though, nothing can be said in this place, since we are engaged only in a critique of how our resources stand—whether we are to build at all, and how high we may run up our building from the stuff we have (the pure a priori concepts).

Section 2. The discipline of pure reason in respect of its polemical use

Reason must submit itself to criticism in all of its undertakings and cannot curtail the freedom of criticism through any prohibition without harming itself and drawing upon itself a suspicion detrimental to it. Now there is nothing so important with respect to utility, nothing so sacred, that it might exempt itself from this testing and surveying examination, which respects no person. Upon this freedom rests the very existence of reason, which wields no dictatorial authority, but whose verdict is on every occasion nothing more than the concurrence of free citizens , every one of whom must be free to utter his misgivings—indeed his veto—without any reserve.

But even though reason can never refuse itself to criticism, it does not at all times have cause to dread it. But pure reason, in its dogmatic (as against mathematical) employment, is not so assured of scrupulously observing its highest laws that it could avoid presenting itself with diffidence—nay, with the wholesale surrender of every pretended dogmatic authority—before the scrutinizing gaze of a loftier, judicial reason.

Matters stand quite otherwise when its business is not with the judge's censure but with the pretensions of a fellow citizen, against which it has merely to defend itself. For since these wish to be every bit as dogmatic, albeit in denying, as the former in affirming: there arises a justification κατ' ἄνθρωπον that safeguards against every encroachment and yields a titled holding, one that need fear no alien presumptions, notwithstanding that it admits of no adequate proof κατ' ἀλήθειαν on its own account.

What I mean by reason's polemical employment is the vindication of its propositions in the face of the dogmatic denials brought against them. What is at stake here is not whether its claims might, for all that, turn out false, but solely that nobody could at any time uphold the contrary with apodictic certainty (or even with any stronger show of plausibility). For we do not then hold our possession merely on sufferance , if we have before us a title to it, though not a sufficient one, and it stands wholly assured that at no time could anyone establish the unlawfulness of this holding.

There is something disheartening, something that weighs one down, in the very fact that an antithetic of pure reason should exist to begin with, and that reason—which is, after all, the highest tribunal over every dispute—should come to blows with its own self. True, we had before us above just such a seeming antithetic of it; but it emerged that this rested upon a confusion—for, following the ordinary prejudice, one had taken appearances to be things in themselves and had then required an absolute completeness of their synthesis in this manner or that (though it was, on either manner, equally impossible), a completeness that can in no wise be looked for from appearances. So at that time there existed no genuine contradiction of reason with its own self in these propositions: that a series of appearances given in themselves possesses an absolutely first commencement, and, conversely: that such a series is, plainly and in itself, devoid of any commencement whatever; for the two claims are perfectly compatible, since appearances, regarded in respect of their existence (as appearances), amount in themselves to nothing whatsoever—that is, to something self-contradictory—so that positing them must, in the nature of the case, drag contradictory inferences in its train.

But no such confusion can be pleaded, and thereby the conflict of reason settled, if, for instance, one were to assert on the theist's part: there is a highest being, and on the atheist's, to the contrary: there is no highest being; or in psychology: whatever thinks is of an absolute and abiding unity and so is marked off from all perishable material unity, against which another might set: the soul is not an immaterial unity and cannot be spared from perishing. For in this case the object under question is clear of everything alien that would conflict with its nature, and the understanding is here concerned with things in themselves alone, and not with appearances. Here, then, a true conflict would indeed be met with, if only pure reason on the negating side had something to say that came close to the ground of an assertion; for as regards the critique of the proofs of the one who dogmatically affirms, one may well grant it to him without on that account giving up these propositions, which at least have the interest of reason on their side, something the opponent cannot appeal to at all.

I do not, to be sure, share the opinion that outstanding and thoughtful men (Sulzer, for one) have so frequently voiced whenever they sensed the frailty of the proofs offered up to now: that one may hope some day yet to hit upon self-evident demonstrations for the pair of cardinal tenets of our pure reason—that a God exists, that a life to come awaits. On the contrary, I am certain that it never will. For where is reason to find the ground for synthetic claims of that sort, claims bearing on no objects of experience nor on their intrinsic possibility? Yet it is likewise certain, with apodictic force, that no man shall ever step forth capable of maintaining the opposite with even the faintest semblance, still less dogmatically. For seeing that he could make it out through pure reason alone, he would have to set about proving: that a highest being, that the subject thinking within us as pure intelligence, is impossible. But from what quarter is he to draw the cognitions that would license him to judge so synthetically about things lying past all possible experience? We may accordingly rest wholly unperturbed that anyone will one day prove the contrary to us, and on that score have no call to devise proofs framed by the rules of the schools, being free rather to embrace those propositions that sit quite comfortably alongside our reason's speculative concern in its empirical employment and that furnish, besides, the one and only avenue for reconciling it with the practical concern. For the opponent (who here must not be regarded merely as a critic) we have our non liquet in readiness, which must infallibly disconcert him, while we do not refuse the retortion of it upon ourselves, since we constantly hold in reserve the subjective maxim of reason, which the opponent necessarily lacks, and under whose protection we can look upon all his blows in the air with calm and indifference.

So construed, there is properly no antithetic of pure reason whatever. For its one and only battlefield would have to be looked for within pure theology and pure psychology; yet that terrain sustains no fighter clad in full armor and bearing weapons one would have cause to dread. He can come forward only with mockery or braggadocio, which can be laughed at as child's play. This is a comforting remark that gives reason fresh courage; for on what else would it rely, if it, which alone is called to remove all errors, were itself in disarray, without being able to hope for peace and quiet possession?

Everything that nature itself ordains is good for some purpose. Even poisons serve to overpower other poisons that are generated in our own humors, and hence may not be missing from a complete collection of remedies (Officin). The objections against the persuasions and self-conceit of our merely speculative reason are themselves set as tasks by the nature of this reason, and must therefore have their good determination and purpose, which one must not cast to the winds. Why has providence placed some objects, even though they are bound up with our highest interest, so high above us that we are permitted almost only to encounter them in an indistinct and self-doubted perception, whereby prying glances are more provoked than satisfied? Whether it be useful to venture bold determinations with respect to such prospects is at least doubtful, perhaps even harmful. But always and without any doubt it is useful to set the inquiring as well as the examining reason into complete freedom, so that it may attend to its own interest unhindered, an interest that is promoted just as much by its setting bounds to its insights as by its extending them, and that always suffers when foreign hands interfere in order to steer it, against its natural course, toward forced purposes.

Let your opponent, then, only show reason, and combat him solely with the weapons of reason. For the rest, be untroubled about the good cause (the practical interest), for it is never brought into the game in a purely speculative contest. The quarrel then brings to light no more than a certain antinomy of reason which, resting as it does on reason's own nature, must of necessity be heard out and scrutinized. It cultivates that reason by weighing its object from two sides, and rectifies its judgment by hemming it in. What comes into contention here is not the matter, but the tone. For enough is left you still to speak that language, vindicated in the face of the keenest reason, of a steadfast belief, though you have been forced to relinquish the language of knowledge.

Were one to put the question to the cool-headed David Hume, fashioned as he genuinely was for a balanced judgment: what induced you to sap, by means of painstakingly excogitated scruples, the persuasion so consoling and serviceable to man—that its rational insight reaches as far as the assertion and the determinate concept of a highest being?, he would reply: nothing beyond the design of carrying reason further in its self-knowledge, coupled with a certain resentment at the constraint one would fain lay upon reason, in that one makes much of it while at the same time barring it from a frank avowal of the weaknesses that come to light for it in the examination of itself. Turn instead to Priestley—a man given over wholly to the principles that govern the empirical exercise of reason and disinclined toward any transcendent speculation—and ask what motive forces prompted him to pull down the freedom and immortality of our soul (with him the hope of a life hereafter amounts only to the anticipation of a miraculous re-awakening), two such load-bearing columns of all religion, he who is himself a devout and ardent teacher of religion: he could return no other answer than this—the interest of reason, which suffers loss when one seeks to withdraw certain objects from the laws of material nature, the sole laws that we are able to know and determine with precision. It would look unjust to cry down the latter—who contrives to square his paradoxical thesis with the ends of religion—and to wound a well-meaning man because he can no longer orient himself the moment he has strayed beyond the field of natural science. But this indulgence must fall no less to the equally well-disposed Hume, faultless as regards his moral character, who is unable to forsake his abstracted speculation, persuaded on good grounds that its object resides entirely beyond the confines of natural science, within the realm of pure ideas.

What, then, ought to be done in this situation, above all in view of the peril that appears to menace the public welfare as a result of it? There is nothing more natural, nothing more equitable, than the course you are obliged to adopt in the matter. Just let these people go about it; if they show talent, if they show deep and novel inquiry, in a word, if they only show reason, then reason wins every time. If you resort to other means than those of an unconstrained reason, if you cry high treason and call together the common public, which understands nothing of such subtle elaborations, as it were to help put out a fire, you make yourselves ridiculous. For it is by no means a question of what here works to the advantage or disadvantage of the common good, but only of how far reason may advance in its speculating that abstracts from every interest, and whether anything at all is to be reckoned upon here, or whether it must sooner be surrendered outright to the practical. Instead, therefore, of striking in with the sword, look on rather at this dispute calmly from the secure seat of criticism, a dispute that must turn out laborious for the combatants, entertaining for you, and—given a certainly bloodless outcome—profitable for your insights. For there is something thoroughly preposterous in demanding illumination of reason while dictating to it in advance the side on which its verdict must inevitably fall. Besides, reason is already of its own accord so thoroughly curbed and kept in check by reason that you have not the slightest need to muster armed patrols in order to mount civic resistance against whichever party's alarming preponderance strikes you as perilous. Within this dialectic no triumph arises over which you would have any reason to feel disquiet.

Reason, moreover, is greatly in need of such a dispute, and it would be desirable that it had been conducted earlier and with unrestricted public permission. For all the sooner would a mature critique have come about, upon whose appearance all these quarrels must fall away of themselves, since the disputants would learn to see through the delusion and prejudices that had set them at odds.

There is a certain impurity in human nature that in the end, like everything that comes from nature, must after all contain a predisposition to good ends, namely an inclination to conceal one's true dispositions and to put on display certain assumed ones that one holds to be good and creditable. It is quite certain that human beings, through this propensity both to conceal themselves and to assume an appearance advantageous to them, have not merely civilized themselves, but gradually, to a certain degree, moralized themselves, because no one could penetrate the veneer of decency, respectability, and propriety, and thereby discovered, in the ostensibly authentic instances of the good he beheld about him, a schooling toward his own betterment. But this predisposition to represent oneself as better than one is, and to express dispositions one does not have, serves only, as it were, provisionally to bring man out of crudeness and at least to let him first assume the manner of the good that he knows; for afterward, once the genuine principles have been developed and have passed into one's way of thinking, that falsehood must gradually be vigorously combated, because otherwise it corrupts the heart and does not let good dispositions come up under the choking weed of fair appearance.

It grieves me to detect this identical impurity, dissembling, and hypocrisy even within the pronouncements of the speculative cast of mind, in which, after all, men meet with far fewer impediments, and no gain at all, in disclosing the avowal of their thoughts, as fairness would have them do, in an open and unconcealed way. For what can be more detrimental to insights than to communicate to one another even mere thoughts in falsified form, to conceal doubts that we feel against our own assertions, or to give an air of evidence to proofs that do not satisfy even ourselves? As long, however, as it is merely private vanity that instigates these secret intrigues (which is commonly the case in speculative judgments that have no special interest and are not easily capable of apodictic certainty), the vanity of others resists it with public sanction, and things come at last to where the purest disposition and sincerity would have brought them, though far earlier. But where the common public supposes that subtle reasoners are bent on nothing short of unsettling the very base of public welfare, there it appears not merely in keeping with prudence but even sanctioned, indeed positively praiseworthy, to prop up the good cause by means of specious grounds rather than to concede to its putative adversaries so much as the advantage of pitching our tone down to the moderation of a merely practical conviction and forcing us to own the want of speculative and apodictic certainty. Meanwhile I should think that with the intention of upholding a good cause nothing in the world could well be worse combined than underhandedness, dissimulation, and deceit. That, in weighing up the reasons belonging to a bare speculation, all should go on honestly is assuredly the least one is entitled to ask. Yet could one but reckon with assurance on even this little, then the strife of speculative reason touching those weighty questions concerning God, the immortality of the soul, and freedom would long ago have been decided, or would reach its close before long. So it is that uprightness of disposition frequently runs contrary to how good the cause itself may be, and such a cause has, it may be, more candid and honest adversaries than champions.

I therefore presuppose readers who have no wish to see a just cause upheld by unjust means. With respect to them it is now settled that, on our principles of criticism, provided one attends not to what actually occurs but to what ought in fairness to occur, there can properly be no polemic of pure reason at all. For how are two persons to carry on a quarrel over a thing whose reality neither can exhibit in any actual, or even so much as possible, experience, over whose idea each broods in solitude so as to extract from it something more than mere idea—to wit, the very actuality of the object? By what means do they intend to extricate themselves from the dispute, given that neither is able to render his own case straightforwardly intelligible and certain, and each is confined to assailing and rebutting what the other maintains? For such is the destiny that befalls every assertion of pure reason: reaching past the conditions of any possible experience—outside which no attestation of truth is anywhere to be encountered—while yet being obliged to employ those laws of the understanding earmarked solely for empirical application, laws without which not a single stride in synthetic thought is feasible, these assertions perpetually offer their adversary a weak flank, and each turns the other's exposed side to his own account.

One may look upon the critique of pure reason as the genuine tribunal for all disputes belonging to it; for the critique is not itself caught up in those latter disputes, which bear directly upon objects, but is set in place to fix and pass judgment on the rights of reason as such, in keeping with the founding principles of its first establishment.

Deprived of it, reason stands, so to say, in a natural condition, and has no means of pressing or safeguarding its claims and pretensions save through war. Criticism, on the contrary, which takes all its rulings from the founding statutes of its own establishment, whose authority none can call in question, secures for us the tranquillity of a lawful state, wherein our disputes are to be pursued in no other manner than by litigation. That which puts an end to the feuds in the former condition is a victory boasted of by both parties, upon which there commonly ensues but an unstable peace, imposed by the magistrate who interposes himself between them, whereas in the latter it is the sentence which, striking here at the very wellspring of the disputes, is bound to afford a peace that lasts forever. The interminable quarrels of a purely dogmatic reason likewise drive one at last to seek repose in some critique of this very reason and in a body of legislation founded upon it; exactly as Hobbes contends: that the natural condition is one of wrong and violence, which we are bound of necessity to quit so as to place ourselves under a lawful constraint that alone confines our freedom in such fashion that it may stand together with the freedom of every other and, by that very means, with the common good.

To this freedom there also belongs that of publicly exhibiting for judgment one's thoughts and one's doubts, which one cannot resolve oneself, without being decried on that account as a restless and dangerous citizen. This is already contained in the primordial entitlement of human reason, which acknowledges no arbiter save the common reason of mankind at large, wherein each person holds a vote; and since every betterment our condition admits of must issue from this source, an entitlement of the kind is sacred and must not be pared down. Then, too, it is most imprudent to raise the cry of danger over certain bold claims or brazen assaults directed at those who already enjoy the concurrence of the largest and worthiest portion of the community; for to do so is to lend them a weight they ought by no means to possess. Should word reach me that some extraordinary intellect claims to have argued out of existence the freedom of the human will, the prospect of a life to come, and God's existence, I grow keen to open the book, since I count on his gifts to carry my own insights further. Yet this much I hold beforehand with complete assurance, that he will have achieved none of it; not that I fancy myself already holding unassailable proofs of these weighty propositions, but because transcendental critique, having laid bare to me the whole inventory belonging to our pure reason, has thoroughly persuaded me that, precisely as reason proves wholly unequal to affirmative claims in this domain, so it will command as little—indeed still less—wherewith to advance any negative claim about these questions. For whence is the self-styled freethinker to procure his cognition that, say, no highest being exists? Such a claim falls beyond the province of any possible experience, and hence past the frontier of everything human insight can reach as well. As for the dogmatic champion of the good cause who takes the field against this foe, I would decline to read him altogether, aware ahead of time that he assails his rival's spurious grounds merely to clear a passage for his own—and besides, a commonplace illusion yields nowhere near the stuff for fresh remarks that a strange and cleverly devised one supplies. The religious antagonist, on the other hand, dogmatic after his own fashion, would afford my critique the very occupation it could wish for, and an occasion to correct its principles yet further, with nothing whatever to be dreaded on his behalf.

But the young, who are consigned to academic instruction, ought at the very least to be cautioned against writings of this sort and held back from an early familiarity with such perilous propositions, before their faculty of judgment has ripened—or rather, before the doctrine one means to plant in them has struck firm root—so that it may stoutly withstand every inducement to the reverse, from whatever quarter it may issue?

If matters had to remain with the dogmatic procedure in affairs of pure reason, and the dispatching of opponents had to be genuinely polemical, i.e., so constituted that one entered into combat and armed oneself with proofs for opposed assertions, then to be sure nothing would be more advisable for the moment, while at the same time nothing would prove emptier or more barren in the long run, than to set youth's reason under wardship for a season and to keep it, at least that long, safe from seduction. But if subsequently either curiosity or the fashionable tone of the age plays such writings into their hands: will that youthful persuasion then still hold up? One who carries nothing but dogmatic arms to fend off his opponent's assaults, and has no idea how to unfold the concealed dialectic residing every bit as much in his own bosom as in his rival's, watches specious grounds that boast the charm of novelty rise up against specious grounds that possess it no longer, and that rather awaken the suspicion of a youthful credulity turned to abuse. He fancies there is no surer way to prove himself grown past the nursery's tutelage than to override those kindly meant warnings; and, inured to dogmatism, he swallows in deep draughts the poison that dogmatically ruins his principles.

Precisely the reverse of what is counseled here ought to take place in academic teaching, though naturally only where a searching grounding in the critique of pure reason has first been laid down. For if one is to set its principles to work as early as may be and to exhibit their adequacy against the most formidable dialectical semblance, it is altogether requisite to aim the assaults so dreadful to the dogmatist at his own reason—feeble as yet, but illuminated by critique—and to let him try his hand at testing the adversary's baseless claims one by one against those principles. It can be no difficulty at all for him to dissolve them into sheer vapor, and thus he feels early on his own power, against such harmful illusions, which in the end must lose all semblance for him, to secure himself completely. Now although the very same blows that strike down the enemy's edifice must be just as ruinous to his own speculative construction, should he perhaps think to erect one: yet he is entirely untroubled about this, since he has no need at all to dwell in it, but still has before him a prospect into the practical field, where he can with good ground look for firmer soil upon which to raise his reasonable and wholesome system.

And so, in the end, no genuine polemic exists within the field of pure reason. The two sides alike are shadow-fencers grappling with their own shadows, for they venture past nature, where nothing lies ready for their dogmatic clutch that could be grasped and held fast. They may fight to their heart's content; the shades they cleave asunder knit themselves whole again in a moment, after the manner of Valhalla's heroes, ready to divert themselves afresh in bloodless bouts.

But there is also no admissible skeptical use of pure reason, which one might call the principle of neutrality in all its disputes. To set reason at odds with its own self, to furnish it with arms on either side, and thereupon to watch its fiercest clash with unruffled derision, makes a poor showing when viewed dogmatically, and carries about it the look of a gloating and malignant temper. If, however, one considers the invincible delusion and the boasting of the sophists, who will let themselves be moderated by no criticism, then there really is no other counsel than to set against the braggadocio on the one side another that rests on the very same rights, so that reason may at least be given pause by the resistance of an enemy, in order to cast some doubt on its pretensions and to give criticism a hearing. But to let matters rest entirely with these doubts and to make it one's aim to recommend the conviction and confession of one's ignorance not merely as a remedy against dogmatic self-conceit, but at the same time as the way to bring the conflict of reason with itself to an end, is an entirely futile design and can by no means be suited to procuring for reason a state of repose, but is at most only a means of awakening it from its sweet dogmatic dream in order to draw its condition into more careful examination. Since, however, this skeptical manner of extricating oneself from a vexatious affair of reason seems to be, as it were, the short road to attaining a lasting philosophical repose, or at any rate the highway that those gladly take who imagine they lend themselves a philosophical air through a scornful disdain for all investigations of this order, I judge it needful to set out this manner of thought in the light peculiar to it.

On the impossibility of a skeptical satisfaction of pure reason in conflict with itself

The awareness of my own ignorance—unless that ignorance is at the same time recognized as necessary—is not something that should terminate my investigations, but is rather the genuine cause for arousing them. Ignorance of any sort pertains either to things or to the determination and limits of my cognition. Now if this ignorance happens to be contingent, then it must drive me on—in the first case, to pursue the things (objects) dogmatically; in the second, to pursue the limits of my possible cognition critically. That my ignorance, however, is unconditionally necessary, and hence releases me from any further inquiry, is not something that can be established empirically, out of observation, but only critically, by fathoming the earliest wellsprings of our cognition. The boundary-determination of our reason, accordingly, can be accomplished only on grounds that hold a priori; but its restriction—which amounts to a cognition, albeit an indeterminate one, of an ignorance that can never be entirely removed—admits also of being cognized a posteriori, by way of whatever, amid all our knowing, still remains left for us to know. That cognition of one's own ignorance which is possible solely by means of a critique of reason itself thus counts as science, whereas the latter is merely perception, and of it there is no saying how far the conclusion drawn from it may reach. Were I to picture the earth's surface to myself as a plate (in keeping with the sensible appearance), I would have no way of knowing how far it reaches. Yet experience does teach me the following: that no matter where I arrive, I invariably behold a space around me into which I might proceed still further; consequently I come to know the bounds of my geography as it actually stands on each occasion, but not the limits of every possible mapping of the earth. But once I have in fact progressed far enough to know that the earth is a globe and its surface the surface of a globe, then even from a small portion of it—say, the extent of a single degree—I am able to determine the diameter, and by means of it the complete delimitation of the earth, that is, its outer surface, and to cognize this according to principles that are a priori; and though I remain ignorant regarding the objects that this surface may hold, I am not ignorant regarding the compass it embraces, its magnitude and its bounds.

The totality of all possible objects for our cognition strikes us as a level surface furnished with its apparent horizon—that is, with what encompasses the whole extent of it—and this we have named the rational concept of unconditioned totality. To reach this totality empirically is out of the question, and every attempt to fix it a priori by a certain principle has proven futile. In the meantime, every question that our pure reason raises is nonetheless directed at whatever might lie beyond this horizon, or at most along its bounding line.

David Hume, that celebrated thinker, was one such geographer of human reason, and he supposed that he had adequately dealt with all those questions at a stroke by banishing them beyond reason's horizon—a horizon that he was nevertheless incapable of determining. He lingered above all over the principle of causality, and observed of it—quite correctly—that its truth (indeed, not even so much as the objective validity that belongs to the concept of an operative cause in general) rests upon no insight whatsoever, that is, upon no a priori cognition; and that, accordingly, what makes up its whole standing is not in the slightest the necessity of this law, but a merely general usefulness of it in the course of experience, together with a subjective necessity springing from that usefulness, which he terms habit. From the inability of our reason, then, to put this principle to any use that would carry beyond all experience, he drew the conclusion that all of reason's pretensions to reach past the empirical are null and void.

A procedure of this sort—one that submits the Facta of reason to scrutiny and, as circumstances warrant, to rebuke—may be termed the censure of reason. There is no doubting that such censure leads unfailingly to doubt directed against every transcendent employment of the principles. This, however, is merely the second step, one that by no means yet brings the labor to completion. The first step in the affairs of pure reason, the one distinctive of its childhood, is dogmatic. The second step just named is skeptical, and it bespeaks the wariness of a power of judgment grown shrewd through experience. But a third step is now required as well—one that falls to none but a matured and virile power of judgment, resting upon maxims that are firm and vindicated in their universality: namely, to submit to appraisal not reason's Facta but reason itself in the whole of its capacity and its aptitude for pure cognitions a priori; and this is not the censure but the critique of reason, through which not merely bounds but the determinate limits of reason are established—not merely ignorance in this or that part, but with respect to all possible questions of a certain sort, and that too not merely by conjecture but by proof from principles. Skepticism, then, is a place of rest for human reason, where it may take stock of its dogmatic wanderings and sketch out the terrain in which it stands, so as thereafter to choose its route with greater assurance—but it is no place of habitation for settled residence; for such a residence can be met with only in a complete certainty, whether of the objects themselves as cognized, or of the limits within which our every cognition of objects lies enclosed.

Our reason is by no means some plane spread out to an indeterminable breadth, whose bounds we discern only in a rough, general way; rather, it has to be likened to a sphere, the radius of which can be ascertained from the curvature of the arc across its surface (the nature of synthetic propositions a priori), and from which, moreover, its content and its delimitation can be stated with assurance. Beyond this sphere (the field of experience) nothing is an object for it; indeed, even questions concerning supposed objects of that kind touch only on subjective principles governing a thoroughgoing determination of the relations that may arise among the concepts of the understanding within this sphere.

We do in fact possess synthetic cognition a priori, as the principles of the understanding, which run ahead of experience, make plain. Now should someone find himself utterly unable to render the possibility of these cognitions comprehensible, he may well at the outset doubt whether they really do dwell in us a priori; but he is not yet in a position to declare them impossible by the mere powers of the understanding, nor to write off as null every step that reason takes along their guiding thread. He can say only this: could we but discern the origin and the genuineness of these cognitions, we should then be able to settle the compass and the limits of our reason; yet before that has come to pass, every assertion of the latter is ventured blindly. And in just this manner a pervasive doubt regarding all dogmatic philosophy—which pursues its way without any critique of reason itself—would be perfectly well grounded; yet this affords no reason to deny reason such an advance altogether, supposing that advance were made ready and made secure by a sounder laying of foundations. For, to begin with, every concept—indeed, every question that pure reason sets before us—lies not in experience at all, but once more within reason itself, and must therefore be capable of resolution and of being grasped with respect to its validity or its correctness. Neither are we entitled to turn these problems away under cover of our own incapacity—as though their resolution truly lay in the nature of things—and to refuse them any further inquiry, given that reason has, within its own womb alone, brought forth these very ideas, and is on that account answerable for their validity or their dialectical semblance.

All skeptical polemic is in truth aimed only at the dogmatist—who, without lodging any mistrust in his original objective principles, that is, without critique, proceeds gravely on his way—and its sole purpose is to throw him off his reckoning and bring him around to self-knowledge. Taken by itself, it settles nothing whatever concerning what we know and, conversely, what we cannot know. All the miscarried dogmatic ventures of reason are Facta, and to subject these to censure is always of use. This, however, can settle nothing about the expectations of reason—about its hoping for, and staking claims to, a happier outcome of its future exertions; and so bare censure can never bring to a close the quarrel over the rightful entitlements of human reason.

Since Hume is perhaps the most brilliant among all the skeptics, and beyond contradiction the foremost as regards the influence that the skeptical procedure is capable of exerting upon the awakening of a searching examination of reason, it is well worth the trouble to lay out—so far as befits my aim—the course of his reasonings and the wanderings of a man so discerning and so worthy of esteem, wanderings that had, after all, set out upon the track of truth.

Hume may perhaps have had it in his thoughts—though he never brought it to full development—that in a certain class of judgments we reach out beyond our concept of the object. Judgments of that kind I have called synthetic. As for how I might, by means of experience, pass beyond the concept I have hitherto possessed, there is nothing here to give one pause. Experience is itself a synthesis of this sort among perceptions, one that enlarges the concept I possess through a given perception by means of further perceptions that come to be added to it. But we take ourselves to be capable, a priori as well, of passing beyond our concept and enlarging our cognition . This we undertake either by means of the pure understanding, with regard to what can at the least be an object of experience, or else even by means of pure reason, with regard to such properties of things—or indeed the existence of such objects—as can never make their appearance in experience. Our skeptic failed to draw this distinction between the two kinds of judgment, as he really ought to have, and flatly took this enlargement of concepts out of their own resources—the self-parturition, so to speak, of our understanding (reason included), unfertilized by any experience—to be impossible, and thus took all the ostensible principles of it that are a priori to be figments, and concluded that they amount to nothing more than a habit arising out of experience and its laws, hence to merely empirical rules, contingent in themselves, to which we impute a spurious necessity and universality. In support of this odd proposition, however, he leaned upon the universally acknowledged principle governing the relation of cause to effect. For, since no faculty of the understanding can carry us from the concept of one thing to the existence of another that would thereby be given as universal and necessary, he supposed himself able to conclude from this that, apart from experience, we possess nothing that could enlarge our concept and warrant us in any such judgment that expands itself a priori. That sunlight, in illuminating the wax, should at once melt it while it hardens clay—this no understanding could guess from the concepts we previously held of these things, far less infer by way of a law, and only experience is able to instruct us in such a law. In the transcendental logic, by contrast, we saw that, although we can indeed never pass immediately beyond the content of the concept given to us, we are nevertheless able—wholly a priori, yet in reference to a third thing, namely possible experience, and so a priori after all—to cognize the law of its connection with other things. Thus, when wax that was formerly solid melts, I can cognize a priori that something must have gone before (the sun's warmth, say) upon which, by a constant law, this melting ensued—even though, without experience, I could cognize neither the cause from the effect nor the effect from the cause in any determinate fashion a priori and without experience's instruction. He thus wrongly inferred, from the contingency of our determining according to the law, the contingency of the law itself; and the stepping-out from the concept of a thing toward possible experience—which takes place a priori and constitutes that concept's objective reality—he mistook for the synthesis of objects belonging to actual experience, a synthesis that is of course invariably empirical; by this means, however, he converted a principle of affinity, which is seated in the understanding and pronounces a necessary connection, into a rule of association, such as is encountered solely within the reproductive imagination and can exhibit only contingent connections, never objective ones.

The skeptical wanderings of this otherwise supremely acute man, however, arose above all from a shortcoming he nonetheless had in common with all dogmatists—namely, that he did not systematically take in, at one view, all the modes of the understanding's synthesis a priori. For in that case—to say nothing of the rest here—he would have discovered, for instance, the principle of persistence to be one of the same kind, anticipating experience every bit as much as the principle of causality does. By that route he could likewise have marked out determinate limits for the understanding as it expands itself a priori, and for pure reason. But since he merely restricts our understanding without bounding it—bringing about a general mistrust, yet no determinate acquaintance with the ignorance that is for us unavoidable; since he hauls certain principles of the understanding before the censor without ever setting this understanding, in the whole of its capacity, upon the assaying-scales of critique; and since, having denied it what it genuinely cannot achieve, he presses on and contests its every capacity for self-expansion a priori, notwithstanding that he never brought this whole capacity to appraisal—there befalls him just what invariably fells skepticism: namely, that he is himself thrown into doubt, inasmuch as his objections rest merely upon Factis, which are contingent, and not upon principles capable of effecting a necessary renunciation of the entitlement to dogmatic assertions.

Because he likewise draws no distinction between the well-grounded claims of the understanding and reason's dialectical presumptions—against which, after all, his attacks are principally aimed—reason, whose wholly characteristic impetus is here not disturbed in the slightest but merely impeded, feels that the room for its own expansion has not been sealed off, and can never be turned aside altogether from its endeavors, however much it gets pinched here and there. For against attacks one girds oneself for a counterdefense, and plants one's head all the more rigidly upon the matter, so as to force one's demands through. A thorough reckoning, however, of the whole of its capacity, and the conviction that thereby arises of the certainty of a modest holding amid the vanity of loftier claims, removes all strife and prompts one to settle, peaceably, for a restricted but indisputable possession.

Against the uncritical dogmatist—who has taken no measure of the sphere of his understanding, and has thus never determined the limits of his possible cognition by principles, and who accordingly does not know beforehand how much lies within his power, but proposes to discover it through mere trial—these skeptical assaults are not merely dangerous but downright ruinous to him. For should he be caught out on so much as a single assertion that he cannot vindicate, whose semblance, moreover, he is unable to develop from principles, then the suspicion spreads to all of them, however persuasive they may in other respects always seem.

And so the skeptic is the disciplinarian who schools the dogmatic reasoner toward a sound critique both of the understanding and of reason itself. Once he has reached that point, he need dread no further assault; for he then marks off his own possession from whatever lies wholly beyond it, upon which he raises no claim and over which, accordingly, he cannot become entangled in disputes. The skeptical procedure, therefore, while in itself unsatisfying for the questions of reason, is nonetheless a form of preparatory practice, apt to rouse reason's wariness and to point it toward thorough means by which it can be secured in its rightful possessions.

Section 3. The discipline of pure reason in respect of hypotheses

Since, through the critique of our reason, we finally come to know at least this much—that in its pure and speculative use we are in fact capable of knowing nothing at all: ought it not, for that very reason, to throw open a wider field to hypotheses, seeing that we are at any rate allowed to invent and to opine, if not indeed to assert?

Where imagination is not to rave but is instead to invent beneath the strict oversight of reason, there must always be something settled in advance as wholly certain, neither fabricated nor a bare opinion, and that something is the possibility of the object itself. It is then quite legitimate, as regards the object's actuality, to fall back upon opinion—which, however, if it is not to hang in the air, must be linked, as a ground of explanation, to what is genuinely given and therefore certain, and only then earns the name of a hypothesis.

Now since we are unable to form even the faintest concept a priori of the possibility of dynamical connection, and since the category of the pure understanding is of no use for inventing such a thing, but only for understanding it wherever it turns up within experience: we cannot, in conformity with these categories, originally excogitate so much as a single object endowed with some novel character not specifiable on empirical grounds, and lay it down as the basis of a permissible hypothesis; for that would amount to slipping empty chimeras of the brain under reason in place of concepts of real things. Thus one is not at liberty to think up any new original forces whatever—e.g. an understanding equipped to intuit its object without the senses, or a force of expansion dispensing with all contact, or a novel species of substances, e.g. one that would be present in space without impenetrability, and consequently no community of substances distinct from every kind that experience affords us, no mode of presence other than in space, no persistence other than in time alone. In a word: our reason is capable only of employing the conditions under which experience is possible as conditions under which things themselves are possible, and in no way of fashioning conditions of its own, as it were, in complete independence of these, since concepts of that kind, free of contradiction though they be, would all the same remain devoid of any object.

The concepts of reason, as already stated, are nothing more than ideas and possess, to be sure, no object in any experience—yet they do not on that account denote objects that are invented and at the same time assumed to be possible. They are entertained in a merely problematic manner, so that upon them (treated as heuristic fictions) regulative principles may be founded for the systematic use of the understanding across the field of experience. Should one abandon this, they become mere entities of thought, whose possibility admits of no proof and which cannot, therefore, be laid down as the basis for explaining actual appearances by way of a hypothesis. To think the soul as something simple is entirely allowable, the aim being to posit, in keeping with this idea, a complete and necessary unity of all the mind's powers—even where it cannot be discerned in concreto—as the principle by which we appraise its inner appearances. But assuming the soul to be a simple substance (a transcendent concept) would yield a proposition that is not merely indemonstrable (as a number of physical hypotheses are) but reckless as well, arbitrary and blind, since the simple can turn up in no experience at all, and, if substance is here taken to mean the abiding object of sensible intuition, the very possibility of a simple appearance eludes all comprehension. Beings that are purely intelligible, or purely intelligible properties belonging to the things of the sensible world, cannot, with any legitimately grounded warrant of reason, be adopted as opinion—though, seeing that we possess no concepts of their possibility or impossibility, they can equally not be dogmatically disavowed by appeal to some presumed superior insight.

In explaining given appearances one is entitled to cite no things and no grounds of explanation beyond those already tied to the given ones in accordance with laws of appearance that are already familiar. A transcendental hypothesis, one that would press a bare idea of reason into service for explaining the things of nature, would on that account amount to no explanation whatever, since what one fails to understand adequately from familiar empirical principles would then be accounted for by something one understands not at all. Besides, the principle of such a hypothesis would in truth serve merely to appease reason, contributing nothing to the advancement of the understanding's employment in respect of its objects. Order and purposiveness within nature must, once again, receive their explanation from grounds drawn from nature herself and in conformity with natural laws, and in this domain even the most extravagant hypotheses, so long as they remain physical, prove more bearable than a hyperphysical one—that is, an appeal to a divine author posited to serve this end. For that would be a principle of indolent reason (ignava ratio)—to bypass in one stroke every cause whose objective reality, at least as to its possibility, we might yet come to learn through ongoing experience, merely to settle down in a bare idea that suits reason's convenience so well. But as concerns the absolute totality of the ground of explanation within the series thereof, this can raise no obstacle with respect to the objects of the world, since, these being nothing but appearances, nothing consummated in the synthesis of the series of conditions may ever be expected of them.

Transcendental hypotheses belonging to the speculative use of reason, together with a license to resort, at a pinch, to hyperphysical grounds of explanation in order to compensate for the absence of physical ones, cannot be conceded at all—partly because reason is not thereby carried any further but on the contrary severs the whole onward course of its use, and partly because such a license would in the end have to rob it of every fruit that the cultivation of its own proper soil, namely experience, might yield. For should the explanation of nature grow difficult for us at this point or that, a transcendent ground of explanation stands perpetually ready to hand, one that spares us that labor of inquiry, and our search terminates not in insight but in the utter unintelligibility of a principle already so contrived beforehand that it could not but contain the concept of the absolutely first.

The second thing demanded, if a hypothesis is to deserve acceptance, is that it suffice for determining a priori the consequences that are given. Whenever, to that end, one finds oneself driven to conjure up auxiliary hypotheses, they carry with them the suspicion of sheer fiction, since each of them severally calls for precisely the same warrant that the underlying thought itself stood in need of, and can therefore supply no trustworthy witness. Granting the presupposition of a cause unlimited in its perfection, there is admittedly no shortage of grounds for explaining every purposiveness, order, and magnitude to be met with in the world; that cause, nonetheless, in view of the deviations and evils that present themselves—at least by our concepts—stands in need of yet further hypotheses if it is to be salvaged against these as objections. Should the simple self-subsistence of the human soul, laid down as the ground of its appearances, come under attack from the difficulties raised by phenomena akin to the alterations of matter (its growth and diminution), then fresh hypotheses have to be summoned to its aid—hypotheses not, indeed, without a semblance of truth, yet destitute of all credentials save the one lent them by the opinion adopted as the chief ground , an opinion on whose behalf they are all the same meant to plead.

If the rational assertions cited here by way of illustration (the incorporeal unity of the soul and the existence of a supreme being) are meant to hold not as hypotheses but as dogmas demonstrated a priori, then they are simply not under discussion. In such an event, however, one had better make sure that the proof carries the apodictic certainty of a demonstration. For wishing to make the actuality of such ideas merely probable is a preposterous design, on a par with proposing to establish a theorem of geometry by nothing more than probability. Reason cut off from all experience is able to cognize everything solely a priori and as necessary, or else not at all; its judgment, accordingly, is never an opinion, but consists either in withholding every judgment or in apodictic certainty. Opinions, and judgments of probability regarding what pertains to things, can arise only as grounds explaining what is actually given, or as consequences—following empirical laws—of that which lies at the basis as actual, and thus only within the series of the objects of experience. Beyond this field, to opine is as much as to toy with thoughts—unless it were that one merely held the opinion that, along some insecure route of judgment, one might perhaps come upon the truth.

Yet even though, in questions merely speculative belonging to pure reason, hypotheses find no place as a foundation on which to erect propositions, they remain wholly permissible for the mere purpose of defending such propositions should the need arise—that is , not in a dogmatic but rather in a polemical use. By defense, though, I understand not the piling up of further grounds of proof for one's assertion, but simply the thwarting of the adversary's specious insights, which are meant to do damage to the proposition we have put forward. Now every synthetic proposition arising from pure reason carries with it this distinctive feature: that whoever affirms the reality of certain ideas can never command enough knowledge to render his proposition certain, while the adversary on the opposing side is equally unable to muster the knowledge required to affirm its contrary. Such parity in the fortune allotted to human reason confers no advantage on either party where speculative cognition is concerned, and precisely here lies the true arena of quarrels that admit of no settlement. It will, however, be shown in what follows that, as regards the practical employment, reason does possess a right to assume something which, within the province of bare speculation, it could by no means be authorized to presuppose absent adequate grounds of proof, since presuppositions of that sort all diminish the completeness of speculation—a completeness about which the practical interest troubles itself not in the slightest. There, accordingly, it holds a possession whose legitimacy it is not required to prove, and for which, in fact, it could furnish no proof either. The opponent, then, is the one obliged to furnish proof. Yet since this adversary, aiming to establish the non-being of the disputed object, knows just as little of it as the first party who affirms its actuality: an advantage here declares itself on the side of whoever advances something as a presupposition necessary on practical grounds (melior est conditio possidentis). For he is free, in a kind of self-defense, to press into service on behalf of his good cause the very means his adversary directs against it, namely hypotheses, serving not in the least to reinforce the proof of his position, but only to make plain that the adversary grasps far too little of what the quarrel is about to preen himself on any superiority of speculative insight where we are concerned.

Within the domain of pure reason, then, hypotheses are licensed solely as instruments of warfare—not to establish a right by their means, but merely to defend one. The adversary, however, is one we must in this case invariably look for inside ourselves. For speculative reason, in its transcendental use, is dialectical in itself. Those objections we might have cause to dread reside within us. We are obliged to hunt them out, as one hunts down old claims that yet never fall under any statute of limitations, so as to build a lasting peace upon their destruction . Any outward calm is merely a semblance. The seed of these contestations, rooted in the very nature of human reason, has to be eradicated ; yet how are we to eradicate it unless we allow it liberty, and indeed even feed it, so that it may put forth its foliage, reveal itself by that means, and then be uprooted altogether? So think up for yourselves objections that no adversary has yet lit upon, and go so far as to hand him weapons, or concede to him the most advantageous ground he could ever desire! There is in all this nothing whatever to be dreaded, but much rather to be hoped—namely, that you will procure for yourselves a possession never again to be contested throughout all time to come.

To your full array of arms there now also belong the hypotheses of pure reason, which, though no better than leaden weapons (steeled by no law of experience), can nonetheless always accomplish as much as any that an adversary might wield against you. So if, opposing the soul's immaterial nature—assumed on some other, non-speculative ground and exempt from all bodily alteration—the difficulty arises that experience nevertheless appears to demonstrate the heightening no less than the disordering of our powers of mind to be nothing more than diverse modifications of our organs: you may blunt the force of that demonstration by supposing our body to be merely the foundational appearance upon which, as its condition, the whole capacity of sensibility and with it all thought rests in the present state (during life). Departure from the body would mark the termination of this sensible use to which your cognitive power is put, and the inauguration of its intellectual use. The body, on this view, would not be what causes thought, but only a condition that restricts it, so that, while it must count as promoting sensible and animal life, it must all the more count as a hindrance to pure and spiritual life; and the reliance of the one upon the body's constitution would establish nothing about the reliance of life in its entirety upon the condition of our organs. You are able, however, to press yet further and even to discover fresh doubts, whether not yet raised at all or not pushed far enough.

The contingency of procreations—which in human beings, as in creatures devoid of reason, hangs upon opportunity, and moreover often upon sustenance, upon governance with its moods and caprices, indeed often even upon vice—poses a formidable difficulty against the opinion of a persistence, reaching out into eternities, of a creature whose life first got under way amid circumstances so inconsequential and so utterly abandoned to our freedom. So far as the persistence of the whole kind (here upon earth) goes, the difficulty in respect of it weighs but little, since the chance operative in the single case is none the less subject to a rule in the aggregate; but to look, in respect of every individual, for so potent an effect from causes so slight does certainly seem precarious. In opposition to this, however, you are able to marshal a transcendental hypothesis: that all life, properly speaking, is only intelligible, in no way subordinate to the alterations of time, having neither commenced with birth nor destined to close with death; that this life amounts to no more than an appearance—i.e. a sensible representation of the pure spiritual life—and that the entire sensible world is but an image hovering before our present mode of cognition, one that, dreamlike, possesses in itself no objective reality; that, were we to intuit both things and our own selves as they are, we should find ourselves set within a realm of spiritual natures, our one genuine community with which neither took its start through birth nor will terminate through the death of the body (these being mere appearances), etc.

Now although, of everything we here advance hypothetically to fend off the assault, we neither know the slightest part nor seriously maintain it—the whole being not so much as an idea of reason, but merely a concept devised for the sake of counter-defense—we proceed in all this quite rationally, inasmuch as, to the adversary who fancies he has exhausted every possibility, passing off the want of its empirical conditions falsely as a proof that what we believe is utterly impossible, we do no more than show him: that he is as little able, by mere laws of experience, to span the entire range of things possible in themselves, as we are able, beyond experience, to gain anything for our reason in a well-grounded fashion. Whoever puts such hypothetical counter-remedies in place against the presumptions of the brazenly denying adversary must not be supposed to want to appropriate them as his own genuine opinions. He lets them go the moment he has disposed of the adversary's dogmatic self-conceit. For however modest and restrained it may appear when someone conducts himself, in respect of others' assertions, in a merely refusing and negating way, the pretension is nonetheless, the moment he sets out to press these objections of his as proofs of the contrary, no less haughty and self-important than had he sided with the affirming party and taken up its assertion.

From all this it becomes evident that, in reason's speculative employment, hypotheses possess no validity as opinions taken in their own right, but hold good only in relation to the opposing transcendent pretensions set against them. For stretching the principles that govern possible experience out over the possibility of things as such is no less transcendent than claiming objective reality for concepts of a kind whose objects can be met with nowhere save beyond the limit of all possible experience. Whatever pure reason pronounces assertorically must—as with everything reason cognizes—be necessary, or it is nothing whatsoever. Consequently it harbors, in truth, no opinions at all. The hypotheses under discussion, though, are nothing but problematic judgments which at any rate cannot be refuted, even if, to be sure, nothing can prove them, and are therefore strictly private opinions, of which one nonetheless cannot properly divest oneself (even for the sake of inner calm) in the face of scruples that stir within. In that character, however, they must be kept, and one must scrupulously prevent them from coming forward as self-authenticated and possessed of any absolute validity, thereby drowning reason beneath fabrications and delusions.