Critique of Pure Reason

by Immanuel Kant

  22 In this manner it is proved that the synthesis of apprehension, which is empirical, must necessarily conform to the synthesis of apperception, which is intellectual, and contained in the category entirely a priori. It is one and the same spontaneity, which there, under the name of imagination, and here, under the name of understanding, brings connection into the manifold of intuition.

  23 Lest anybody should be unnecessarily frightened by the dangerous consequences of this proposition, I shall only remark that the categories are not limited for the purpose of thought by the conditions of our sensuous intuition, but have really an unlimited field. It is only the knowledge of that which we think, the determining of an object, that requires intuition, and even in the absence of intuition, the thought of the object may still have its true and useful consequences, so far as the subjective use of reason is concerned. That use of reason, however, as it is not always directed to the determination of the object, that is, to knowledge, but also to the determination of the subject, and its volition, cannot be treated of in this place.

  24 Kant does not carry the division into paragraphs in his second edition further, because, as he says, he has to treat no more of elementary concepts, and prefers, in representing their employment, to adopt a continuous treatment, without paragraphs.

  25 This passage has been translated as amended by Kant himself in the Preface to the Second Edition (p: 386).

  26 The immediate consciousness of the existence of external things is not simply assumed in the preceding theorem, but proved, whether we can understand the possibility of this consciousness or not. The question with regard to that possibility would come to this, whether we have an internal sense only, and no external sense, but merely an external imagination. It is clear, however, that, even in order to imagine only something as external, that is, to represent it to the senses in intuition, we must have an external sense, and thus distinguish immediately the mere receptivity of an external intuition from that spontaneity which characterizes every act of imagination. For merely to imagine an external sense would really be to destroy the faculty of intuition, which is to be determined by the faculty of imagination.

  27 Read der instead of als.

  28 It is easy enough to conceive the non-existence of matter, but the ancients did not infer from this its contingency. Not even the change of being and not-being of any given state of a thing, which constitutes all change, can prove the contingency of that state, as if from the reality of its opposite. The rest of a body, for instance, following on its motion, does not yet prove the contingency of that motion, because the former is the opposite of the latter. The opposite here is opposed to the other, not realiter, but logically only. In order to prove the contingency of the motion of a body, we should have to prove that instead of the motion at the antecedent point of time, it would have been possible for the body to have been at rest at that very time, not that it is at rest afterwards; for in this case both opposites are quite consistent with each other.

  29 The thinking is taken in each of the two premisses in a totally different meaning:—in the major, as it refers to an object in general (and therefore also as it may be given in intuition), but in the minor, only as it exists in its relation to self-consciousness, where no object is thought of, but where we only represent the relation to the self as the subject (as the form of thought). In the former, things are spoken of that cannot be conceived otherwise than as subjects; while in the second we do not speak of things, but of the thinking (abstraction being made of all objects), wherein the Ego always serves as the subject of consciousness. The conclusion, therefore, ought not to be that I cannot exist otherwise than as a subject, but only, that in thinking my existence I can use myself as the subject of a judgment only. This is an identical proposition, and teaches us nothing whatever as to the mode of our existence.

  30 Clearness is not, as the logicians maintain, the consciousness of a representation; for a certain degree of consciousness, though insufficient for recollection, must exist, even in many dark representations, because without all consciousness we should make no distinction in the connection of dark representations, which yet we are able to do with the notae of many concepts (such as those of right and justice, or as the musician does who in improvising strikes several keys at once). A representation is clear in which the consciousness is sufficient for a consciousness of its difference from others. If the consciousness is sufficient for distinguishing, but not for a consciousness of the difference, the representation would still have to be called dark. There is, therefore, an infinite number of degrees of consciousness, down to its complete vanishing.

  31 Those who, in establishing the possibility of a new theory, imagine that they have done enough if they can show triumphantly that no one can show a contradiction in their premisses (as do those who believe that they understand the possibility of thinking, of which they have an example in the empirical intuitions of human life only, even after the cessation of life) can be greatly embarrassed by other possible theories, which are not a whit bolder than their own. Such is, for instance, the possibility of a division of simple substance into several, or of the coalition of several substances into one simple substance. For although divisibility presupposes a composite, it does not necessarily require a composite of substances, but of degrees only (of the manifold faculties) of one and the same substance. As, then, we may conceive all powers and faculties of the soul, even that of consciousness, as diminished by one-half, the substance still remaining, we may also represent to ourselves, without any contradiction, that extinguished half as preserved, though not within it, but outside it, so that as the whole of what is real in it and has a degree, and therefore the whole existence of it, without any rest, has been halved, another separate substance would arise apart from it. For the plurality, which has been divided, existed before, though not as a plurality of substances, yet of every reality as a quantum of existence in it, and the unity of substance was only a mode of existence, which by mere division has been changed into a plurality of substantiality. In the same manner several simple substances might coalesce again into one, nothing being lost thereby, but merely the plurality of substantiality; so that one substance would contain in itself the degree of reality of all former substances together. We might suppose that the simple substances which give us matter as a phenomenon (not indeed through a mechanical or chemical influence upon each other, but yet, it may be, by some unknown influence, of which the former is only a manifestation), produce by such a dynamical division of parental souls, taken as intensive quantities, what may be called child-souls, while they themselves repair their loss again through a coalition with new matter of the same kind. I am far from allowing the slightest value of validity to such vague speculations, and I hope that the principles of our Analytic have given a sufficient warning against using the categories (as, for instance, that of substance) for any but empirical purposes. But if the rationalist is bold enough to create an independent being out of the mere faculty of thought, without any permanent intuition, by which an object can be given, simply because the unity of apperception in thought does not allow him to explain it as something composite, instead of simply confessing that he cannot explain the possibility of a thinking nature, why should not a materialist, though he can as little appeal to experience in support of his theories, be entitled to use the same boldness, and use his principle for the opposite purpose, though retaining the formal unity on which his opponent relied?

  32 The 'I think' is, as has been stated, an empirical proposition, and contains within itself the proposition, I exist. I cannot say, however, everything which thinks exists; for in that case the property of thinking would make all beings which possess it necessary beings. Therefore, my existence cannot, as Descartes supposed, be considered as derived from the proposition, I think (for in that case the major, everything that thinks exists, ought to have preceded), but is identical with it. It expresses an indefinite empirical intuition, that is, a perception (and proves,
therefore, that this proposition, asserting existence, is itself based on sensation, which belongs to sensibility), but it precedes experience, which is meant to determine the object of perception through the categories in respect to time. Existence, therefore, is here not yet a category, which never refers to an indefinitely given object, but only to one of which we have a concept, and of which we wish to know whether it exists also apart from that conception or no. An indefinite perception signifies here something real only that has been given merely for thinking in general, not therefore as a phenomenon, nor as a thing by itself (noumenon), but as something that really exists and is designated as such in the proposition, I think. For it must be observed, that if I have called the proposition, I think, an empirical proposition, I did not mean to say thereby, that the ego in that proposition is an empirical representation; it is rather purely intellectual, because it belongs to thought in general. Without some empirical representation, however, which supplies the matter for thought, the act, I think, would not take place, and the empirical is only the condition of the application or of the use of the pure intellectual faculty.

  33 It is necessary to put a comma after Prädicats.

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