Third Section. On the interest of reason in these its conflicts.

So now the whole dialectical game of the cosmological ideas lies before us, ideas that in no way allow a congruent object to be given them in any possible experience, indeed that do not even allow reason to think them in accord with universal laws of experience — laws that are, for all that, not arbitrarily contrived, but ones to which reason is of necessity led in the continuous progress of the empirical synthesis, whenever it wishes to release from every condition that which, by the rules of experience, can always be determined only conditionally, and to seize it in its unconditioned totality. These ratiocinating assertions are so many endeavors to resolve four natural and inescapable problems that reason poses, of which, accordingly, there can be exactly this many, no more and likewise no fewer, since there exist no further series of synthetic presuppositions that draw an a priori limit around the empirical synthesis.

We have presented the brilliant pretensions of a reason that widens its territory past every boundary of experience only in dry formulas that contain merely the ground of its rightful claims, and, as befits a transcendental philosophy, we have divested them of all that is empirical, even though the entire magnificence of reason's assertions can blaze forth only in conjunction with that very element. In this application, however, and in the steadily advancing enlargement of reason's use, as it sets out from the field of experiences and by degrees soars upward to these sublime ideas, philosophy manifests a dignity that, could it only make good its pretensions, would leave the worth of all other human science far beneath itself, inasmuch as it holds out the foundation for our greatest expectations and prospects regarding the final ends in which every exertion of reason must at last come together. The questions — whether the world possesses a beginning and some boundary to its extension in space; whether anywhere, and perhaps within my thinking self, there is an indivisible and indestructible unity, or nothing but what is divisible and transitory; whether in my actions I am free, or, like other beings, am led along the thread of nature and of destiny; and whether, in the end, a supreme world-cause exists, or whether instead the natural things and their order make up the ultimate object at which we must come to rest in all our reflections: these are questions to whose resolution the mathematician would happily surrender his whole science; for that science, after all, can furnish him no contentment with respect to the highest and most pressing ends of humanity. Even the proper dignity of mathematics (this pride of human reason) rests on the fact that, since it gives reason the guidance to gain insight into nature, in the large as much as in the small, in respect of its order and lawful regularity, and likewise in the admirable unity of the forces that move it, far beyond every expectation of a philosophy that builds upon ordinary experience, it thereby itself furnishes occasion and encouragement for that use of reason extended past all experience, and likewise stocks the worldly wisdom occupied therewith with the finest materials for lending support, so far as the character of the inquiry permits, to its research by way of appropriate intuitions.

Unfortunately for speculation (though perhaps fortunately for the practical vocation of the human being), reason, in the midst of its greatest expectations, finds itself so hemmed in by a press of grounds and counter-grounds that, since for the sake both of its honor and even of its safety it is not advisable to draw back and to look on with indifference at this quarrel as at a mere mock combat, still less flatly to command peace, because the object of the strife is one of keen interest, nothing further is left to it than to ponder the origin of this dissension of reason with itself: whether perhaps some mere misunderstanding may be at fault in it, upon whose clearing up the proud claims on either side would indeed perhaps drop away, but in their stead a lasting and untroubled reign of reason over understanding and the senses would take its start.

For the present we will still hold this thorough treatment in abeyance and beforehand take into account the following: toward which side we would most readily incline, were we by chance compelled to take a side. Since in this case we consult not the logical touchstone of truth but merely our own interest, such an inquiry, even though it decides nothing regarding the contested right of the two parts, will nevertheless prove useful in rendering intelligible why those taking part in this dispute have thrown in with the one side rather than the other, without any superior insight into the object having in fact been the reason for it, and useful, likewise, in explaining still other incidental matters, for example the zealous heat of the one party and the cool assertion of the other, why they gladly cheer their joyous applause to the one and are irreconcilably prejudiced beforehand against the other.

There is, however, something that in this preliminary assessment fixes the standpoint from which alone it can be undertaken with due thoroughness, and this is the comparison of the principles from which the two parts proceed. Among the assertions of the antithesis one notices a perfect uniformity in the manner of thinking and a complete unity of maxim, namely a principle of unmixed empiricism, not merely in explaining the appearances within the world, but also in resolving the transcendental ideas concerning the world-whole itself. The assertions of the thesis, on the other hand, place at the basis, over and above the empirical mode of explanation within the series of appearances, intellectual beginnings as well, and to that extent the maxim is not simple. But, taking my cue from its essential distinguishing mark, I will call it the dogmatism of pure reason.

On the side, then, of the dogmatism in the determination of the cosmological ideas of reason, or of the thesis, there shows itself:

First, a certain practical interest, in which everyone of good disposition, if he understands his own true advantage, gives a heartfelt assent. That the world had a beginning, that the self which thinks in me is of simple, and on that account imperishable, nature, that this same self is at once free in its voluntary actions and lifted above the constraint of nature, and that, in the end, the whole order of the things making up the world stems from an original being from which everything borrows its unity and purposive connection: these amount to just so many cornerstones for morality and for religion. The antithesis tears away from us every one of these supports, or at any rate appears to do so.

Second, a speculative interest of reason likewise makes itself felt on this side. For when the transcendental ideas are adopted and put to use in this fashion, one can grasp wholly a priori the entire chain of conditions and comprehend the derivation of the conditioned, by starting from the unconditioned; something the antithesis does not accomplish, and thereby recommends itself very badly, in that it can offer no answer to the question about the conditions of its synthesis that would not leave over, endlessly, an ever further asking. On its account, from any given beginning one has to climb to a yet higher one, every part points to a yet smaller part, each occurrence has above it still another occurrence serving as its cause, and the conditions of existence taken generally brace themselves ever again upon others, without ever gaining, in some self-subsisting thing as original being, an unconditioned footing and support.

Third, this side has, over and above this, the advantage of popularity, which surely makes up no small part of its recommendation. Ordinary understanding meets not the least difficulty in the ideas of the unconditioned beginning of all synthesis, since in any case it is more used to descending toward consequences than to climbing toward grounds, and in the concepts of the absolutely first (over whose possibility it does not brood) it possesses a comfort and, at the same time, a fixed point on which to fasten the guiding cord of its steps, whereas in the restless ascent from conditioned to condition, forever with one foot in the air, it can take no pleasure whatever.

On the side of empiricism in the determination of the cosmological ideas, or of the antithesis, there is to be found:

Firstly, no such practical interest springing from pure principles of reason as morality and religion carry along with them. Rather, mere empiricism seems to strip both of all force and influence. If no original being set apart from the world exists, if the world has no beginning and hence no author either, if our will is not free and the soul shares the same divisibility and corruptibility as matter: then the moral ideas and principles too forfeit all validity and topple along with the transcendental ideas that made up their theoretical prop.

By contrast, however, empiricism holds out to the speculative interest of reason advantages that are highly alluring and far exceed anything the dogmatic instructor in the ideas of reason might promise. On the former view, the understanding remains at every moment upon its own native ground, that is, the field consisting of nothing but possible experiences, whose laws it can track and by means of which it can extend, without end, its secure and graspable cognition. Here it can, and ought to, present the object both as it is in itself and in its relations for intuition, or else in concepts whose image can be set out clearly and distinctly in given, similar intuitions. Not only does it have no need to forsake this chain of the natural order so as to cling to ideas whose objects it does not know, because, being things of thought, they can never be given; rather, it is not even allowed to quit its work and, on the pretext that this has now been carried to its end, to cross over into the province of idealizing reason and to transcendent concepts, where it no longer has any need to observe and to inquire in keeping with the laws of nature, but only to think and to invent, assured that no facts of nature can refute it, since it is precisely not bound to their testimony, but may pass them by, or may even subordinate them to a higher authority, namely that of pure reason.

The empiricist will therefore never permit any epoch of nature to be taken as the absolutely first, or any limit of his outlook upon nature's compass to be viewed as the outermost, or a passage to be made from the objects of nature, which observation and mathematics enable him to resolve and to fix synthetically within intuition (the extended), to those that neither sense nor imagination can ever exhibit in concreto (the simple); nor will he grant that in nature itself one may place at the basis a faculty of acting independently of nature's laws (freedom) and thereby curtail for the understanding its work of tracking, along the guiding thread of necessary rules, the arising of appearances; nor, finally, will he allow that for anything the cause is to be sought outside of nature (original being), since we know nothing besides nature, it being the one thing that offers us objects and can instruct us about their laws.

To be sure, if the empirical philosopher, with his antithesis, has no other aim than to beat down the presumption and the overreach of a reason that misjudges its true vocation, which makes a great show of insight and knowledge just where insight and knowledge actually give out, and that means to pass off, as a furthering of the speculative interest, what one lets stand with respect to the practical interest, so as, where it suits its own comfort, to snap the thread of physical investigations and, on a pretense of extending cognition, to fasten that thread to transcendental ideas, through which one really cognizes only that one knows nothing; if, I say, the empiricist rested content with this, then his fundamental principle would amount to a maxim of restraint in its claims, of modesty in its assertions, and, at once, of the widest attainable enlargement of our understanding under the tutor genuinely appointed over us, namely experience. For under such circumstances we would not find ourselves robbed of intellectual presuppositions and belief for the benefit of our practical affairs; only these could not be allowed to appear under the title and the pomp of science and rational insight, because the properly speculative knowledge can nowhere light upon any object other than that of experience, and, once one crosses its boundary, the synthesis that ventures cognitions of a new sort, owing nothing to experience, is left without any substratum of intuition upon which it might be brought to bear.

But if, in this way, empiricism, with regard to the ideas, itself turns dogmatic (as for the most part it does) and brashly denies whatever stands above the reach of its intuiting cognitions, then it itself lapses into the fault of immodesty, which here is all the more to be censured because thereby an irreplaceable disadvantage is inflicted on the practical interest of reason.

Herein lies the opposition of Epicureanism⁵² to Platonism.

Both of them assert more than they know, yet in such a way that the former spurs on and advances knowledge, albeit to the detriment of the practical, while the latter does indeed put excellent principles for the practical into our hands, but on that very account, with regard to everything for which alone a speculative knowledge is granted us, allows reason to dwell on idealized explanations of natural appearances and, over this, to let physical research fall by the wayside.

As to the third moment that may be looked to in the preliminary choice between the two contending parts: it is quite remarkable that empiricism runs entirely counter to all popularity, however much one might have thought that ordinary understanding would eagerly seize upon a plan that undertakes to content it with nothing beyond experiential cognitions and the reason-governed coherence among them, rather than transcendental dogmatics forcing it to climb to concepts that far outreach the insight and the rational capacity of the heads most practiced in thinking. But precisely this is its motive. For it then finds itself in a condition in which not even the most learned man can presume any advantage over it. If it grasps little or nothing of the matter, then no one else can boast of grasping much more of it either, and although it cannot speak on this as academically as others, it can nonetheless ratiocinate about it beyond all measure, since it strolls about amid nothing but ideas, concerning which one is most eloquent precisely because one knows nothing of them; whereas over the investigation of nature it would have to grow wholly mute and confess its ignorance. Comfort, then, and vanity are already a powerful recommendation of these principles. And besides, although a philosopher finds it very hard to adopt anything as a principle when he cannot render an account of it to himself, or even to bring in concepts whose objective reality cannot be discerned, to ordinary understanding nothing is more familiar. It wants to have something with which it may confidently make a start. The trouble of grasping such a presupposition in its own right gives it no unease, because such a presupposition (given that it does not know what grasping means) never so much as enters its head, and it takes for known whatever, through frequent use, has grown habitual to it. In the end, however, all speculative interest fades away in it before the practical, and it fancies that it discerns and knows precisely what to assume or believe its anxieties or hopes drive it toward. Thus the empiricism of transcendentally idealizing reason is wholly stripped of all popularity, and however much that is prejudicial to the supreme practical principles it may harbor, there is nonetheless no cause whatever to fear that it will ever pass beyond the bounds of the school and gain, in the commonwealth at large, even a moderately notable standing or any favor with the great multitude.

Human reason is by its nature architectonic, that is, it views all cognitions as members of a possible system and therefore admits only such principles as at least do not make a cognition one has in view unfit to coexist with others within some system. The propositions of the antithesis, however, are of a sort that makes the completion of any structure of cognitions wholly impossible. On their showing, over any one state of the world there is always a still older one, in every part still further parts, again divisible, before every occurrence another that had likewise been produced in its turn from elsewhere, and, in existence generally, everything forever only conditioned, without any unconditioned and first existence being acknowledged. Since, therefore, the antithesis nowhere concedes a first and no beginning that might serve outright as the ground of the building, a finished edifice of cognition is, on presuppositions of this kind, wholly impossible. Hence the architectonic interest of reason (which calls for a rational unity that is not empirical but pure and a priori) brings with it a natural endorsement of the claims put forward by the thesis.

But could a human being renounce all interest and take the assertions of reason into consideration merely by the substance of their grounds, indifferent to all consequences, then such a person, granting that he knew of no way out of the press other than to profess himself to one or the other of the contending doctrines, would be in a ceaselessly wavering condition. On one day it would appear compelling to him that the human will is free; on the next, upon weighing the unbreakable chain of nature, he would judge freedom to be nothing more than a self-delusion, and hold that all things are simply nature. But once it came to deed and action, this game of merely speculative reason would dissolve like the phantom shapes of a dream, and he would settle his principles purely on the basis of the practical interest . Yet because it does become a reflective and inquiring being to devote certain seasons solely to the testing of its own reason, while therein casting off all partiality entirely and so imparting its remarks openly to others for their judgment, no one can be blamed, still less barred, for letting the propositions and counter-propositions step forward just as, frightened by no threat, they are able to defend themselves before jurors of their own estate (namely the estate of frail human beings).

Fourth Section. On the transcendental problems of pure reason, in so far as they absolutely must be capable of a solution.

To set out to solve every problem and to answer every question would amount to a brazen grandiloquence and to a conceit so unbridled that one would immediately strip oneself of all trust. And yet certain sciences are so constituted by their very nature that each question raised within them must, without qualification, admit of an answer drawn from what one already knows, since the answer is bound to issue from the same sources out of which the question issues, and where it is on no account permissible to fall back on inescapable ignorance—rather, a resolution may be insisted upon. In every conceivable case, what counts as right or wrong must, as a rule, be something we are able to know, since it touches our obligation, and where we cannot know, no obligation binds us either. When it comes to explaining the appearances of nature, by contrast, a great deal is bound to stay uncertain for us and more than one question insoluble, for what we know of nature falls far short, in many a case, of what we are called upon to explain. The question that now arises is this: whether, within transcendental philosophy, there is any question bearing on an object set before reason that this same pure reason proves unable to answer, and whether one is entitled to excuse oneself from giving it a conclusive answer by classing it—as something flatly uncertain (among all that lies within our power to cognize)—together with those matters of which we do indeed grasp enough to pose a question, while yet altogether lacking the means or the faculty to resolve it at any time.

My claim, then, is that transcendental philosophy holds, amid all speculative cognition, a peculiarity all its own: that not a single question touching on an object given to pure reason lies beyond solution for this very human reason, and that no appeal to an inescapable ignorance, or to some unfathomable depth in the task, can discharge us from the duty of answering it soundly and in full, seeing that the very concept enabling us to raise the question must without fail equip us as well to reply to it, inasmuch as the object is to be encountered nowhere apart from the concept itself (as happens with right and wrong).

Within transcendental philosophy, however, the only questions in whose case one may justly insist on a satisfactory answer touching the constitution of the object—without the philosopher being at liberty to slip away from it by pleading an impenetrable darkness—are the cosmological ones; and such questions can bear on nothing but cosmological ideas. For the object has to be something given in experience, and all that is asked is how far it matches an idea. Where the object is transcendental and therefore itself unknown—say, whether that something whose appearance (in our own case) is thinking, namely the soul, is a being simple in itself; whether there exists a cause of all things taken together that is absolutely necessary; and so forth—there we are to look, for our idea, to an object which we may grant is unknown to us and yet is not on that score impossible.⁵³ It is a feature belonging to the cosmological ideas, and to these alone, that they can take their object—together with the empirical synthesis that its concept demands—as already given; and the question issuing from them bears solely on the advance of this synthesis, in so far as that advance is to embrace absolute totality, a totality which is no longer anything empirical, since it can be furnished in no experience. Now since what is at issue here is merely a thing regarded as the object of a possible experience, and not as a thing existing in itself, the transcendent cosmological question can find its answer in nothing beyond the idea, for it has to do with no object taken in itself; and as regards possible experience, what is being asked after is not that which in concreto could be furnished in some experience, but that which resides in the idea, toward which the empirical synthesis is merely to draw nearer: and so it must admit of resolution from the idea by itself; for the idea is nothing but a product of reason, which accordingly cannot disown the accountability and load it onto the unknown object.

It is less remarkable than it may first appear that a science should be able, with respect to every question falling within its own compass (quaestiones domesticae), to insist upon and look forward to solutions that are one and all certain, even if for the time being they may perhaps still lie undiscovered. Apart from transcendental philosophy there remain two pure sciences of reason, the one merely speculative in content, the other practical: pure mathematics and pure morals. Has anyone ever heard it maintained that, owing as it were to a necessary ignorance of the conditions, it was pronounced uncertain what precise ratio the diameter holds to the circle, whether in rational or in irrational numbers? Since by the former it cannot be given congruently at all, while by the latter it has yet to be found, the verdict was that the impossibility of any such solution can at least be cognized with certainty, and of this Lambert furnished a proof. In the universal principles of morality there can be nothing uncertain, for the propositions are either wholly null and void of sense, or else must proceed simply from our concepts of reason. In the study of nature, on the other hand, conjectures are infinite in number, and for none of them may one ever look to attain certainty, because the appearances of nature are objects handed to us in a manner independent of our concepts, so that the key to them resides not in us and our pure thinking but beyond us, and precisely on that account cannot, in many cases, be tracked down, so that no reliable disclosure is to be looked for. I do not include here the questions of the transcendental analytic that concern the deduction of our pure cognition, since our present business is solely the certainty of judgments about objects, not the certainty about the origin of our concepts themselves.

We shall accordingly find no escape from the duty of at least a critical resolution of the rational questions placed before us by voicing laments over the cramped bounds of our reason and professing, with the air of a modest self-knowledge, that it surpasses our reason to settle whether the world has been from eternity or took a beginning; whether the space of the world is filled to infinity with beings or shut up within certain limits; whether anything at all in the world is simple, or whether everything must undergo division to infinity; whether there is a begetting and producing out of freedom, or whether everything is strung upon the chain of nature's order; and lastly whether some being exists that is utterly unconditioned and necessary in itself, or whether everything, in respect of its existence, is conditioned and hence dependent from without and contingent in itself. For every one of these questions concerns an object that admits of being given nowhere save in our thoughts—namely, the utterly unconditioned totality belonging to the synthesis of appearances. Should we prove unable to state and settle anything certain about it from our own concepts, we are not at liberty to lay the fault on the thing that hides itself from us; for no thing of that kind can be given to us at all (since outside our idea it is met with nowhere), and we must instead seek the cause in our idea itself—an idea that is a problem admitting of no resolution, and one to which we nonetheless obstinately suppose that an actual object answers. Were the dialectic residing within our very concept laid out with clarity, it would soon bring us to full certainty as to how a question of this sort ought to be judged on our part.

Against your plea of uncertainty regarding these problems one may set, to begin with, this question, which you are bound at the very least to answer plainly: from where do these ideas come to you, whose resolution here embroils you in such difficulty? Are they, perhaps, appearances that stand in need of explanation, and for which, following out these ideas, you have merely to search for the principles, or the rule, of their exposition? Grant that nature lay entirely disclosed before you, that nothing were concealed from your senses and from your awareness of all that is set before your intuition: even so, no single experience would let you cognize the object of your ideas in concreto (for beyond this complete intuition there would further be demanded a synthesis carried to completion, along with awareness of its absolute totality, which no empirical cognition can possibly yield); and thus your question can in no way be necessary for explaining any appearance that turns up, nor, so to speak, be assigned to you by the object itself. For the object can at no time present itself to you, since it can be given through no possible experience. Throughout every possible perception you stay hemmed in under conditions, be it in space or in time, and never reach anything unconditioned by which to settle whether this unconditioned should be looked for in the synthesis's absolute beginning or in an absolute totality of the series lacking any beginning whatever. The whole, though, taken in an empirical sense, is always merely comparative. As for the absolute whole of magnitude (the world-whole), of division, of descent, of the condition of existence as such—together with every question whether it is to be brought off through a finite synthesis or one to be prolonged to infinity—this lies wholly outside the concern of any possible experience. You could not, for example, account for the appearances of a body one jot better, nor even so much as otherwise, by supposing it to be composed of simple parts rather than, throughout, of composite ones; for neither a simple appearance nor, no less, an infinite composition can ever come before you. Appearances call for explanation only to the extent that the conditions for explaining them are furnished within perception; yet whatever may at any time be given in them, gathered up into a single absolute whole, is not itself a perception. Yet it is exactly this whole whose explanation the transcendental problems of reason call for.

Since, then, not even the solving of these problems can ever crop up within experience, you are in no position to maintain that it remains uncertain what should be attributed to the object on this point. For your object resides solely within your brain and admits of being given nowhere outside it; and so your only task is to reach agreement with yourself and to head off the amphiboly that would turn your idea into a purported representation of an object given empirically and therefore to be cognized in keeping with the laws of experience. The dogmatic solution, accordingly, is not so much uncertain as it is impossible. The critical one, on the other hand—which is capable of being wholly certain—regards the question not objectively at all, but in the light of the ground of the cognition on which it is founded.

Section 5. Skeptical representation of the cosmological questions through all four transcendental ideas.

We would happily abandon our insistence on having these questions settled dogmatically, could we but see beforehand this much: that no matter how the answer came out, it would do nothing but deepen our ignorance, tumbling us from one unintelligibility into the next, from one darkness into a darkness deeper still, and possibly even into outright contradictions. Where a question admits only of a yes or a no, the wiser course is to hold in reserve, for the time being, the supposed grounds on either side, and to weigh first of all what would actually be won should the verdict fall one way, and what should it fall the other. Should it emerge that either verdict yields pure vacuity of sense (nonsense), we then have solid warrant for turning a critical eye on the question itself, asking whether it may not rest upon some baseless assumption, trifling with an idea whose falsehood shows itself more plainly in the use one makes of it, and in what follows from it, than when the idea is entertained on its own. Herein lies the signal advantage of the skeptical way of handling those questions that pure reason addresses to pure reason, whereby a vast dogmatic tangle may be cleared away at slight cost, and replaced with a temperate critique that, working like a genuine purgative, will thoroughly flush out the delusion and its retinue, the craving to know everything.

Suppose, then, that of some cosmological idea I could discern at the outset the following: that whichever side of the unconditioned in the regressive synthesis of appearances it happened to take, it would in any event turn out, measured against every concept of the understanding, to be either too great or too small: I should then see that, given how this idea deals only with an object of experience meant to answer to a possible concept of the understanding, it must be wholly vacant and devoid of meaning, since no object squares with it, however I might contrive to fit one to it. And such is indeed the situation with every world-concept, which for this very reason drags reason, so long as it stays attached to them, into an inescapable antinomy. For only take

first, the world to have no beginning: then, set against your concept, it comes out too great; for that concept, resting as it does on a step-by-step regress, can never overtake the whole of an eternity already elapsed. Grant instead that it does have a beginning: then once more, for the concept your understanding forms in the requisite empirical regress, it proves too small. For a beginning still supposes some earlier time lying before it, and so is not yet unconditioned; the rule governing the empirical employment of the understanding lays on you the duty of inquiring after a yet higher temporal condition, and by that rule the world plainly falls out too small.

No differently does it go with the two competing answers to the question of the world's magnitude as regards space. For should it be infinite and without bound, then relative to any possible empirical concept it is too great. Is it finite and bounded, then you are within your rights to press further: what fixes that limit? Vacant space is no correlate of things subsisting in its own right, and can furnish no condition at which you might halt, and even less an empirical condition forming any part of a possible experience. (For of the utterly void, who could ever have any experience?) Yet the absolute totality of an empirical synthesis invariably demands that the unconditioned itself amount to a concept of experience. And so a bounded world proves, measured by your concept, too small.

Secondly: let every appearance in space (matter) be composed of infinitely many parts, and the regress of dividing them stands, for your concept, forever too great; but let the dividing of space come to rest at some one member of the series (the simple), and it stands, for the idea of the unconditioned, too small. For that member always leaves standing a further regress to the several parts it contains.

Thirdly: grant that whatever comes to pass in the world is nothing but consequence under the laws of nature, and the causality of any cause is itself, once again, an occurrence, one that makes your regress to a still higher cause—and thus the lengthening of the chain of conditions a parte priori—unending and unavoidable. Bare operative nature, then, outstrips your every concept in the synthesis of what befalls the world, being too great.

Opt here and there for happenings brought about spontaneously, and so for an origination out of freedom: at once the "why" dogs you under an inescapable law of nature, driving you past this point by the causal law of experience, and you find a totality of linkage of that kind to be too small for the empirical concept you cannot forgo.

Fourthly. Posit an utterly necessary being (whether the world at large, or some item within it, or the world's cause): you thereby lodge it in a time infinitely far removed from any moment you care to name, for otherwise it would hang upon some further, more ancient existence. But such an existence then lies beyond the reach of your empirical concept, indeed too great for you to arrive at by any prolongation of the regress whatever.

Should you hold, however, that everything comprised in the world (whether as conditioned or as its condition) is contingent: then any existence handed to you falls, for your concept, too small. For it forces you to go on casting about for some other existence upon which this one leans.

In each of these cases our claim has been that the idea of the world stands to the empirical regress, and therewith to any possible concept of the understanding, either as too great or else as too small. Why have we not put it the reverse way, saying: that in the first case the empirical concept is on every occasion too small for the idea, and in the second too great, so that the fault, so to speak, sticks to the empirical regress; rather than arraigning the cosmological idea for straying, by excess or by deficiency, from its aim, which is possible experience? Our reason ran thus. It is possible experience, and this alone, that can lend our concepts reality; failing that, a concept is nothing but an idea, bereft of truth and of any bearing on an object. The possible empirical concept therefore served as the measuring-rod against which the idea had to be assessed—whether it be a bare idea and creature of thought, or whether out in the world it does light upon its object. For we pronounce a thing too great or too small in comparison with something else only where it is posited purely for that other's sake and has to be tailored to it. One of the toys of the old dialectical schools was this puzzle: when a ball will not pass through a hole, how is one to put it—is the ball too big, or is the hole too small? Here it makes no difference which way you choose to phrase it; for you have no way of telling which of the pair exists for the sake of the other. You will not, on the other hand, declare the man too tall for his coat; you will say the coat is too short for the man.

We are thus led, at the very least, to a warranted suspicion: that the cosmological ideas—and with them every one of those subtly reasoned assertions pitted against each other—may rest at bottom on an empty, purely fancied concept of the manner in which the object of these ideas comes to be given us; and this suspicion is already enough to set us on the right scent, so that we may expose the sham that has misled us for so long.

Sixth Section. Transcendental idealism as the key to the solution of the cosmological dialectic.

In the transcendental aesthetic we established well enough: that whatever gets intuited in space or in time — and thus every object of an experience that is possible for us — amounts to nothing beyond appearances, that is, to mere representations which, taken just as they are represented, whether as extended beings or as series of alterations, possess outside our thoughts no existence grounded in itself. This tenet I term transcendental idealism.⁵⁴ The realist in the transcendental sense converts these modifications of our sensibility into self-subsistent things, and thereby turns mere representations into things in themselves.

It would be to wrong us were one to saddle us with that empirical idealism, so long and so widely decried, which, in granting the proper actuality of space, denies — or at the very least finds questionable — the existence of the extended beings lodged within it, and allows no adequately demonstrable difference between dream and truth on this head. Where the appearances of inner sense in time are concerned: with these, taken as actual things, it meets no difficulty; indeed, it goes so far as to claim that this inner experience, of itself and by itself alone, furnishes adequate proof of the actual existence of its object (in itself, along with the whole of this temporal determination).

Our transcendental idealism, conversely, grants this: that objects given to outer intuition are actual to just the degree that they are intuited in space, and that, within time, every alteration is as actual as inner sense presents it. For, space being already a form of the very intuition we term outer, and there being no empirical representation whatsoever apart from objects situated in it: we are both able and obliged to take extended beings within it to be actual; and matters stand no differently with time. And yet that space itself, this time along with it, and, together with the two of them, the whole of appearances, are of themselves no things, but purely and simply representations, and are wholly incapable of existing beyond our mind; indeed, even the inner, sensible intuition that our mind has of itself (as an object of consciousness), whose determination is presented by way of the succession of diverse states across time, is not the self proper, such as it exists in itself, nor is it the transcendental subject, but merely an appearance handed over to the sensibility of this being that remains unknown to us. That this inner appearance exists as a thing thus subsisting in itself is something that cannot be admitted, for its condition is time, and time can never serve as a determination of any thing considered in itself. Within space and within time, however, the empirical truth of appearances stands sufficiently secured, and is set well apart from any affinity with dream, so long as the two hang together, correctly and throughout, within one experience in accordance with empirical laws.

The objects of experience, then, are never given in them selves, but come to be given solely within experience, and apart from it they have no existence whatever. That there could be dwellers on the moon, though no human being has ever laid eyes on any, must of course be admitted, yet this signifies no more than this: that, in the possible onward march of experience, we might light upon them; for whatever hangs together, within a single context, with a perception according to the laws of the empirical advance is actual. They are, then, actual at the point where they enter into an empirical connection with my actual consciousness, though this by no means makes them actual in themselves, that is, outside this onward advance of experience.

Truly, nothing is handed to us save perception together with the empirical advance leading from it to further possible perceptions. For, taken in themselves, appearances — being mere representations — have their actuality nowhere but in perception, which is, in point of fact, nothing else than the actuality of an empirical representation, that is, of an appearance. To name an appearance a real thing in advance of perception signifies either that, in the course of experience, we are bound to light upon such a perception, or else it carries no significance at all. For one might well assert that it exists of itself, with no bearing on our senses and on possible experience, were the subject under discussion a thing in itself. But the subject under discussion is merely an appearance in space and in time, both of which amount to no determinations of things in themselves, but solely to determinations of our sensibility; and so whatever resides within them (appearances) is not, of itself, anything, but consists of mere representations that, unless they are given within us (in perception), are to be encountered simply nowhere.

The capacity for sensible intuition is, properly speaking, no more than a receptivity — a susceptibility to being affected, in a certain manner, by representations whose mutual relation constitutes a pure intuition of space and of time (these being one and all forms of our sensibility), and which, to the extent that within this relation (space and time) they admit of connection and determination according to the laws by which experience is made one, receive the name objects. What non-sensibly causes these representations stays altogether hidden from us, so that we are unable to intuit it as an object; for an object of that kind would have to be presented neither in space nor in time (which are but conditions of sensible representation), and without those conditions no intuition can so much as be thought by us. We may nevertheless assign to the merely intelligible cause of appearances at large the title of transcendental object, purely so as to have on hand something answering to sensibility taken as a receptivity. To this transcendental object we are free to assign the entire scope and interconnection of the perceptions possible for us and to declare: that, of itself, it stands given antecedently to all experience. The appearances, though, are, in conformity with it, given not of themselves but solely within this experience, since they are mere representations that stand for an actual object only in the guise of perceptions, namely when a given perception coheres with all the rest according to the rules by which experience is unified. One may accordingly put it thus: the actual things belonging to past time have their givenness in the transcendental object of experience; yet they count, for me, as objects — and as actual in bygone time — only so far as I picture to myself that a regressive series of possible perceptions (be it upon the guiding thread of history, or upon the traces of causes and their effects) leads, by empirical laws — the course of the world, in short — back to an elapsed stretch of time serving as the condition of the present time, a stretch that even then is pictured as actual only within the nexus of a possible experience and not of itself, so that every event that has run its course from unfathomable antiquity, before ever I existed, signifies nothing beyond the possibility of lengthening the chain of experience upward, from the perception now at hand, toward the conditions that fix it as regards time.

Should I, then, picture to myself the totality of existing objects of the senses across all time and all spaces at once: I am not thereby inserting them into the two ahead of experience; rather, such a picture is nothing else than the thought of a single possible experience taken in its absolute entirety. Within it, and nowhere besides, are those objects (which are nothing beyond mere representations) actually given. But to say that they exist ahead of all my experience amounts merely to saying that they are to be encountered in that portion of experience to which I, taking my start from perception, have first of all to press forward. The cause of the empirical conditions of this advance — hence upon which members, and likewise how far, I might light upon such in the regress — is transcendental, and for that reason bound to remain unknown to me. Yet it is not this cause that is at issue, but merely the rule governing the advance of experience, wherein the objects, that is to say appearances, come to be given to me. In its upshot, moreover, it comes to precisely the same thing: whether I say that, in the empirical progression through space, I might chance upon stars a hundredfold more remote than the outermost ones within my sight; or whether I say that such are perhaps to be met with somewhere in cosmic space, even though no human being has ever perceived them or ever shall; for even were they given as things in themselves, bearing no relation at all to possible experience as such, they remain, for me, nothing whatever — and hence no objects — save to the degree that they fall within the series of the empirical regress. It is only in a bearing of a wholly different sort — where these very appearances are to be pressed into service for the cosmological idea of an absolute whole, and where the question at stake accordingly overreaches the boundaries of possible experience — that it becomes of any moment to distinguish the manner in which one takes the actuality of such thought objects of the senses, this being needed to head off a treacherous delusion that cannot but arise out of a misreading of our own concepts of experience.

Section 7. Critical decision of the cosmological conflict of reason with itself.

The whole antinomy into which pure reason falls turns upon a single dialectical inference: if something conditioned is given, then so too is the entire series of the conditions on which it depends; now, the objects of sense are presented to us as conditioned; consequently, etc. Through this rational inference—whose major premise looks so natural and compelling—there arise, according to the different kinds of conditions (within the synthesis of appearances) so far as these make up a series, precisely as many cosmological ideas; and these ideas demand the absolute totality of such series, thereby throwing reason inevitably into discord with itself. Before we lay bare the deceptive character of this sophistical argument, however, we must first equip ourselves for the task by correcting and pinning down certain concepts that turn up within it.

First, this much is plain and beyond any doubt: that once the conditioned is given, we are thereby handed a regress through the series of all its conditions as our task; for the concept of the conditioned already entails as much, since by it a thing is referred back to a condition, and, should that condition itself be conditioned, to one still further removed, and thus onward through every member of the series. This proposition, accordingly, is analytic, and it rises above all dread of any transcendental critique. It amounts to a logical postulate of reason—to track by means of the understanding, and to prolong as far as one can, that linkage of a concept with its conditions which is already inherent in the concept as such.

Furthermore: supposing that both the conditioned and its condition are things in themselves, then, when the former has been given, the regress to the latter is not merely set as a task—rather, that latter is in fact co-given along with it; and, because this applies to each member of the series alike, the complete series of conditions, and with it the unconditioned too, is at once co-given—or, more precisely, is taken for granted the moment the conditioned (which only that series rendered possible) is given. Here the synthesis linking the conditioned to its condition is one performed by the mere understanding, which represents things as they are while paying no regard to whether, or how, we might arrive at cognizance of them. With appearances, by contrast—which, being nothing more than representations, are simply not given until I gain cognizance of them (i.e., until I arrive at the appearances themselves, since they amount to nothing beyond empirical cognizances)—I cannot assert in that same sense that, the conditioned being given, all the conditions belonging to it (as appearances) are given along with it; and I am therefore in no position whatever to conclude to the absolute totality of their series. For appearances, within the very apprehension of them, are in themselves nothing but an empirical synthesis (one carried out in space and in time), and for that reason they are given solely within it. Now it in no way follows that, given the conditioned (in appearance), the synthesis making up its empirical condition is co-given and presupposed thereby; on the contrary, such a synthesis occurs for the first time only within the regress, and never independently of it. What one may quite properly say in such a case, however, is that on this side a regress toward the conditions—that is, an ongoing empirical synthesis—is commanded or set as a task, and that conditions supplied by this regress can never run short.

This makes it plain that the major premise of the cosmological syllogism construes the conditioned in the transcendental sense proper to a pure category, while the minor premise construes it in the empirical sense of an understanding-concept brought to bear on mere appearances; and so the dialectical sleight lodged within it is the one known as Sophisma figurae dictionis. This deceit, however, is nothing artificially manufactured, but rather a wholly natural delusion of ordinary reason. For by means of it we take for granted (in the major premise) the conditions together with their series, sight unseen as it were, the instant something is presented as conditioned—this being merely the logical requirement that complete premises be posited for a given conclusion; and in the tie between the conditioned and its condition no temporal ordering shows up at all: the two are assumed, in themselves, to be given all at once. It is, moreover, just as natural (in the minor premise) to treat appearances as if they were things in themselves—objects, that is, delivered to the understanding on its own—exactly as was done in the major premise, seeing that I had set aside every condition of intuition, the sole conditions under which objects can be given to us. Yet in proceeding thus we had passed over a noteworthy distinction between these concepts. The joining of the conditioned to its condition, along with the whole series of those conditions (in the major premise), brought with it no restriction by time whatever and no notion of succession. The empirical synthesis, on the other hand—the series of conditions within appearance, the one subsumed under the minor premise—is of necessity successive, its members given only in temporal succession; and so I was unable, in this case, to presuppose the absolute totality of the synthesis and of the series it represents here in the way I could in the other, for there every member of the series stands given in itself (with no temporal condition attached), while here the members become available only by way of the successive regress, a regress that exists only insofar as one genuinely carries it through.

Now that a false step of this kind has been fastened upon the argument that both sides had jointly placed at the base (of the cosmological assertions), the two disputing parties may with justice be turned away as litigants who ground their demand on no valid title. Still, this does not so far settle their contest as to have proven them—both, or at least one of the pair—mistaken in the very thing asserted (in the conclusion), even granting that he could not rest it on solid grounds of proof. Indeed, nothing looks more evident than this: that where one party maintains the world had a beginning and the other maintains the world never began but reaches back through all eternity, surely one of the two has to be in the right. But if that holds, then—precisely because the evidence weighs the same on either hand—it still proves impossible ever to make out on which side the right resides; and the quarrel persists just as it did, even after the parties have been ordered to hold their peace before reason's court of law. No route is left, then, for bringing the dispute to a thorough close that will satisfy both sides, save this: that, given how elegantly each can demolish the other, they be brought in the end to see that their quarrel is about nothing at all, and that a certain transcendental illusion has conjured up for them an actuality in a place where none can be met with. It is precisely this way of laying to rest a quarrel admitting of no verdict that we now propose to follow.

The Eleatic Zeno, a dialectician of great subtlety, had already been rebuked in the strongest terms by Plato as a mischievous sophist, for this: that, in order to show off his art, he would prove one and the same thesis by means of specious arguments only to knock it down again, moments later, with others fully as strong. His claim was that God (though in his mouth this was presumably no more than the world) is neither the one nor the other of finite and infinite, is as little in motion as at rest, and stands neither in likeness nor in unlikeness to anything else whatsoever. It struck those who passed judgment on him here as though he had wished flatly to reject a pair of mutually contradictory claims—something plainly absurd. For my part, though, I do not see that the charge can justly be laid at his door. The first among these claims I shall shortly bring under closer scrutiny. As regards the others: supposing he took the term God to mean the universe, then he was surely bound to hold that it neither abides fixed in its location (at rest) nor shifts out of it (moves), for all locations lie within the universe alone, so that the universe has itself no location at all. If the totality of the world encloses within it all that there is, then, just so far, it bears neither resemblance nor its opposite to any other thing, since beyond it lies no other thing against which it might be measured. Whenever two mutually opposing judgments rest on a condition that cannot be granted, then, despite the conflict between them (which for all that is no real contradiction), the two collapse together, since there collapses the very condition on which alone either proposition was meant to stand.

Should someone declare that every body either has a good smell or has no good smell, a third possibility comes into play—namely, that it gives off no smell whatever (has no scent)—and thus the two opposing statements may both turn out false. Were I instead to say that it is either sweet-smelling or else not sweet-smelling (vel suaveolens vel non suaveolens), the two judgments would then stand in contradictory opposition, and only the former is false, while its contradictory counterpart—that some bodies are not sweet-smelling—takes in as well those bodies which give off no smell at all. In the earlier contrast (per disparata) the accidental condition belonging to the concept of bodies (their odor) stayed in force alongside the opposing judgment, and so went uncancelled by it, which is why that opposing judgment was not the contradictory counterpart of the first.

Suppose, then, that I assert the world to be, as regards space, either infinite or not infinite (non est infinitus); in that event, if the first statement is false, its contradictory opposite—that the world is not infinite—has to be true. By this I should be cancelling merely an infinite world while setting up no other in its place, no finite one, that is. If, however, the claim went: the world is either infinite or else finite (non-infinite), then the pair of them might both be false. For then I am looking upon the world as something fixed in itself as to its magnitude, inasmuch as, within the opposition, I do more than cancel infinity (and with it, it may be, the world's entire independent existence): I attach to the world a determination, treating it as a thing real in its own right—and this too may well be false, in case the world is not a thing in itself in any sense, and hence is not given, as to magnitude, either as infinite or as finite. Let me be permitted to name an opposition of this sort the dialectical kind, and the opposition of contradiction the analytic opposition. And so, of two judgments opposed in the dialectical manner, both may be false—just because the one, rather than simply contradicting its fellow, asserts something over and above what contradiction calls for.

Take the two propositions—that the world is infinite as to magnitude, and that the world is finite as to its magnitude—and treat them as contradictory opposites: one then supposes the world (the whole series of appearances) to be a thing existing in itself. For it goes on being just that, no matter whether it is the infinite or the finite regress within the series of its appearances that I cancel. Should I, on the other hand, strike out this presupposition—this transcendental illusion—and refuse the world any status as a thing in itself, the contradictory clash of the two claims is thereby transformed into one that is merely dialectical; and since the world enjoys no existence in itself whatever (apart from the regressive series of my representations), it exists as a whole neither infinite in itself nor finite in itself. One meets with it solely in the empirical regress that runs through the series of appearances; taken on its own, it is nowhere to be found. And so, this series being at all times conditioned, it is never given in its entirety; the world, accordingly, forms no unconditioned whole, and thus has no existence as a whole of that kind—whether its magnitude be infinite or finite.

Whatever has here been said regarding the first of the cosmological ideas—that is, the absolute totality of magnitude within appearance—applies equally to all the others. The series of conditions can be met with only in the regressive synthesis as such, and not on its own in the appearance, as though the latter were a self-subsistent thing given ahead of all regress. I shall therefore have to say, likewise, that the number of parts within any given appearance is, in itself, neither finite nor infinite—for an appearance is not anything self-subsistent, and its parts first come to be given by, and in the course of, the regress of the decomposing synthesis, a regress never delivered as flatly complete, be it finite or infinite. Precisely the same is true of the series of causes stacked one upon another, or of conditioned existence reaching up toward an existence unconditionally necessary, which can at no point be taken, as to its totality, for something either finite or infinite in itself; for as a series of subordinated representations it has its being only in the dynamical regress, whereas before that regress, as a self-standing series of things in themselves, it is incapable of existing at all.

Thus, then, is the antinomy of pure reason laid to rest in respect of its cosmological ideas—by the demonstration that it is nothing but dialectical, a clash produced by illusion, arising because the idea of absolute totality (valid only as a condition of things in themselves) has been carried over to appearances, which have their existence merely in representation and, when they form a series, in the successive regress, but which apart from this have no existence whatever. Turned around, however, this antinomy can also be put to a real use—critical and doctrinal in kind, though certainly not dogmatic: it lets us establish, by an indirect route, the transcendental ideality of appearances, for anyone who might find the direct demonstration in the transcendental aesthetic insufficient. That demonstration would take the shape of the following dilemma. Were the world a whole subsisting in itself, it would have to be either finite or else infinite. But the one option and the other are alike false (by the arguments set out above, those of the antithesis in the first case and of the thesis in the second). It is therefore likewise false that the world (the totality of all appearances taken together) constitutes a whole that subsists in itself. And from this it follows, in turn, that appearances as such amount to nothing beyond our representations—which is exactly the point we were making in speaking of their transcendental ideality.

This observation carries weight. It shows us that the foregoing proofs of the fourfold antinomy were no empty conjuring-tricks but soundly grounded—on the supposition, that is, that appearances, or a world of sense taking them all up within it, were things in themselves. The clash among the propositions derived from that supposition, however, discloses that a falsity is lodged in it, and in this way brings us to uncover the genuine character of things considered as objects of the senses. The transcendental dialectic, then, offers no aid whatever to skepticism, though it does aid the skeptical method, which may cite it as a specimen of its great value, once one allows reason's arguments to confront one another in their utmost freedom—arguments that, even if in the end they fail to deliver what was being sought, will yet on every occasion yield something useful, something that serves to set our judgments right.

Section 8. Regulative principle of pure reason in respect of the cosmological ideas.

Since, by the cosmological principle of totality, no greatest member of the conditions ranged in series within a sensible world—taken as a thing existing in its own right—is ever given, but can at most be set as a task as we regress through them: the principle of pure reason under discussion, its sense once rectified in this manner, still keeps its full legitimacy—not, to be sure, as an axiom bidding us conceive the totality in the object as actual, but as a problem posed to the understanding, hence to the subject, requiring it to set going and pursue, answerably to the completeness lodged in the idea, the regress through the conditions leading up to a given conditioned.

For within sensibility—that is, in space and in time—each condition we can reach while expounding appearances that are given proves in turn to be itself conditioned: for such appearances are no self-subsistent objects wherein the wholly unconditioned might conceivably have its place, but are nothing more than empirical representations, which have invariably to locate their condition in intuition, this condition fixing their place in space or in time. Properly speaking, then, the principle of reason amounts to nothing but a rule that enjoins, across the conditions belonging in series to given appearances, a regress which is at no point allowed to come to rest upon anything utterly unconditioned. It is accordingly no principle governing how experience is possible, nor how objects of the senses come to be cognized empirically, and so it is no principle of the understanding, since any experience stays shut within the limits set for it (in keeping with the intuition that is given); neither is it a constitutive principle of reason for stretching the concept of the sensible world past every experience that could be had: it is, rather, a principle for pressing experience onward and widening it as far as ever it will go, one under which no boundary met with empirically need count as a boundary that is absolute—in short, a principle of reason that as a rule lays down what we are to do in the regress, while it does not anticipate whatever may, in the object itself, stand given in advance of any regress at all. Hence I call it a regulative principle of reason—whereas the principle asserting an absolute totality of the conditions in their series, on the footing that it is given in itself within the object (that is, within the appearances), would come out as a constitutive cosmological principle, and it is exactly this drawing of a line that lets me expose the emptiness of such a principle, so as to head off what otherwise happens without fail (by way of transcendental subreption): the crediting of an idea, whose office is merely to serve as a rule, with objective reality of its own.

Now to pin down aright what this rule of pure reason means, one should observe at the outset that it is in no position to tell us what the object may be, but only in what manner the empirical regress ought to be set going, if we are to reach a complete concept of that object. For were the first of these the case, the rule would turn into a constitutive principle, and a thing of that sort can never issue from pure reason. One can therefore not in the least intend, by means of it, to pronounce the conditions that lead up to a given conditioned to be, taken by themselves, either finite or endless in their series; for so doing would let a bare idea of absolute totality, fashioned wholly out of itself, think an object that no experience can ever supply, since a run of appearances would thereby be endowed with an objective reality owing nothing to the empirical synthesis. All the idea of reason does, then, is lay down for the regressive synthesis running through the conditions a rule whereby that synthesis moves on from the conditioned, passing through every condition subordinate to another, toward the unconditioned—though the latter is at no time attained. For nowhere in experience does the strictly unconditioned come to be met with.

With this aim in view, the first thing is to fix with precision what the synthesis of a series comes to, given that such a synthesis is never brought to completion. For this end people ordinarily fall back on a pair of expressions supposed to mark off something here, though no one is really able to state on what the marking-off rests. Among mathematicians one hears exclusively of a progressus in infinitum. Those who inquire into concepts—the philosophers—would, in that phrase's stead, admit as valid only the term progressus in indefinitum. Rather than linger over weighing the misgiving that counseled the latter to draw such a line, or over whether the drawing of it proves serviceable or barren, I shall undertake to settle exactly what these concepts amount to as regards the end I have in view.

It is quite proper to say of a straight line that one may prolong it endlessly, and in this instance telling apart an infinite advance and one reaching indeterminably far (progressus in indefinitum) would amount to a hollow piece of hairsplitting. For granted that, when the direction runs: carry a line further, it does read more accurately to append in indefinitum rather than in infinitum—the first amounting to no more than: lengthen it as far as you care to, whereas the second says: you must never leave off lengthening it (and that is just not what is meant here)—still, so long as the discussion turns solely on what can be done, the first expression hits the mark exactly; for you are able to keep on enlarging the line without any end. And matters stand the same way in every case where the talk concerns merely the progressus—the passing onward, that is, from what conditions to what is conditioned; among appearances this possible passage runs on to infinity. Starting from a couple who are parents, you may proceed endlessly downward along the line of begetting and may perfectly well suppose that in the world it really does run on in that way. For at this point reason has no call for any absolute totality of the series, seeing that it does not lay such totality down beforehand as a condition, as though it were handed over (datum), but only as a further conditioned item, one that is merely such as can be supplied (dabile) and gets appended without any end.

The task wears an altogether different look when the question is this: how far does the regress reach that climbs from the conditioned already given up to its conditions taken in series; may I pronounce it a going-back into the infinite, or only a going-back that stretches indeterminably far (in indefinitum); and may I therefore, beginning with people now alive, mount upward without end through the line of their forebears, or is all that can be said this: that however far back my steps have carried me, at no point does an empirical ground turn up for treating the line as limited somewhere, so that I stand both entitled and bound to go on hunting, beyond each of the earliest fathers, for a progenitor of his—yet without being entitled to take one for granted.

My contention, then, is this: once the whole has been furnished in empirical intuition, the regress across the inner conditions ranged within it runs on to infinity. But where merely a single link of the series is on hand, one from which the regress toward absolute totality has yet to get under way: there occurs nothing beyond a going-back into indeterminate breadth (in indefinitum). So of the dividing of a portion of matter (a body) presented within its own bounds one has to say: it goes on to infinity. For this matter lies before us entire, and hence, together with each of the parts it can have, is furnished in empirical intuition. Since, now, what conditions this whole is a part of it, and what conditions that part is again a part lying within the part, and so forth, while throughout this regress of taking-apart no unconditioned—that is, indivisible—link of these serial conditions is ever come upon, there is not merely nowhere any empirical warrant for halting the division; rather, the still further links yielded by the division to be carried on are themselves, in advance of that continued dividing, given empirically—which is to say, the dividing proceeds to infinity. The line of forebears belonging to some particular person, by contrast, is nowhere within a possible experience laid out in its absolute totality; and yet the regress does climb from any link of this begetting to a higher one, so that we light upon no empirical bound that would set out some link as unconditioned in the strict sense. Since, however, the links that might here supply the condition do not, ahead of the regress, already lie within the empirical intuition of the whole: this regress does not run to infinity (as the dividing of what is given does), but into an indeterminable breadth in the hunt for additional links to append to those given, which in their turn are always themselves given only as conditioned.

In neither of the two cases—the regressus in infinitum no more than the in indefinitum—does one look upon the conditions in their series as given in the object as infinite. What we have here are not things existing in their own right but simply appearances, which, as one another's conditions, get furnished nowhere except in the regress itself. The question, accordingly, is no longer how large these serial conditions are in their own right, whether finite or infinite—for in their own right they are nothing at all—but rather how we go about the empirical regress and how far we ought to press it on. And on this head a considerable difference shows itself as regards the rule governing such advance. Where the whole has been supplied empirically, it is possible to make one's way back into the infinite through the inner conditions ranged within it. But where that whole is not supplied, and is instead to be furnished only through an empirical regress, all I can say is: it stays possible without end to move on to conditions higher still in the series. In the earlier case my statement could run: there stand present, empirically furnished, always more links than I ever get to by the regress (the taking-apart); in the second, however: within the regress I can push on yet further still, for no link is furnished empirically as unconditioned in the strict sense, and so a higher link is left standing as always possible, and with it the demand for that link as something required. There it was needful to come upon more links of the series, whereas here it is always needful to ask after more of them, since no experience sets an absolute bound. For either you possess no perception that draws a flat limit around your empirical regress—in which case you are not to hold that regress finished—or you do possess a perception of the sort that bounds your series, and then it cannot rank as one of the members already traversed (since what does the bounding has to be kept apart from what gets bounded by it), so that you are obliged to prosecute your regress onward to this condition as well, and thus without cease.

The section that comes next will, by putting these observations to use, cast upon them the light that is their due.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Concluding remark on the entire antinomy of pure reason.

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

Chapter 3. The Ideal of Pure Reason.

Section 1. On the ideal in general.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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