===================================
{37} Cf. Critique, the chapter on "Transcendental Ideals."
===================================
§ 55. The third transcendental Idea, which affords matter for the
most important, but, if pursued only speculatively, transcendent and
thereby dialectical use of reason, is the ideal of pure reason. Reason
in this case does not, as with the psychological and the cosmological
Ideas, begin from experience, and err by exaggerating its grounds, in
striving to attain, if possible, the absolute completeness of their
series. It rather totally breaks with experience, and from mere
concepts of what constitutes the absolute completeness of a thing in
general, consequently by means of the idea of a most perfect primal
Being, it proceeds to determine the possibility and therefore the
actuality of all other things. And so the mere presupposition of a
Being, who is conceived not in the series of experience, yet for the
purposes of experience—for the sake of comprehending its connexion,
order, and unity—i.e., the idea [the notion of it], is more easily
distinguished from the concept of the understanding here, than in the
former cases. Hence we can easily expose the dialectical illusion
which arises from our making the subjective conditions of our thinking
objective conditions of objects themselves, and an hypothesis
necessary for the satisfaction of our reason, a dogma. As the
observations of the Critique on the pretensions of transcendental
theology are intelligible, clear, and decisive, I have nothing more to
add on the subject.
General Remark on the Transcendental Ideas.
§ 56. The objects, which are given us by experience, are in many
respects incomprehensible, and many questions, to which the law of
nature leads us, when carried beyond a certain point (though quite
conformably to the laws of nature), admit of no answer; as for example
the question: why substances attract one another? But if we entirely
quit nature, or in pursuing its combinations, exceed all possible
experience, and so enter the realm of mere ideas, we cannot then say
that the object is incomprehensible, and that the nature of things
proposes to us insoluble problems. For we are not then concerned with
nature or in general with given objects, but with concepts, which have
their origin merely in our reason, and with mere creations of thought;
and all the problems that arise from our notions of them must be
solved, because of course reason can and must give a full account of
its own procedure.{38} As the psychological, cosmological, and
theological Ideas are nothing but pure concepts of reason, which
cannot be given in any experience, the questions which reason asks us
about them are put to us not by the objects, but by mere maxims of our
reason for the sake of its own satisfaction. They must all be capable
of satisfactory answers, which is done by showing that they are
principles which bring our use of the understanding into thorough
agreement, completeness, and synthetical unity, and that they so far
hold good of experience only, but of experience as a whole.
===================================
{38} Herr Platner in his Aphorisms acutely says (§§ 728, 729), "If
reason be a criterion, no concept, which is incomprehensible to human
reason, can be possible. Incomprehensibility has place in what is
actual only. Here in comprehensibility arises from the insufficiency
of the acquired ideas." It sounds paradoxical, but is otherwise not
strange to say, that in nature there is much incomprehensible (e.g.,
the faculty of generation) but if we mount still higher, and even go
beyond nature, everything again becomes comprehensible; for we then
quit entirely the objects, which can be given us, and occupy ourselves
merely about ideas, in which occupation we can easily comprehend the
law that reason prescribes by them to the understanding for its use in
experience, because the law is the reason's own production.
===================================
Although an absolute whole of experience is impossible, the idea of a
whole of cognition according to principles must impart to our
knowledge a peculiar kind of unity, that of a system, without which it
is nothing but piecework, and cannot be used for proving the existence
of a highest purpose (which can only be the general system of all
purposes), I do not here refer only to the practical, but also to the
highest purpose of the speculative use of reason.
The transcendental Ideas therefore express the peculiar application of
reason as a principle of systematic unity in the use of the
understanding. Yet if we assume this unity of the mode of cognition to
be attached to the object of cognition, if we regard that which is
merely regulative to be constitutive, and if we persuade ourselves
that we can by means of these Ideas enlarge our cognition
transcendently, or far beyond all possible experience, while it only
serves to render experience within itself as nearly complete as
possible, i.e., to limit its progress by nothing that cannot belong to
experience: we suffer from a mere misunderstanding in our estimate of
the proper application of our reason and of its principles, and from a
Dialectic, which both confuses the empirical use of reason, and also
sets reason at variance with itself.
Conclusion.
On the Determination of the Bounds of Pure Reason.
§ 57. Having adduced the clearest arguments, it would be absurd for
us to hope that we can know more of any object, than belongs to the
possible experience of it, or lay claim to the least atom of knowledge
about anything not assumed to be an object of possible experience,
which would determine it according to the constitution it has in
itself. For how could we determine anything in this way, since time,
space, and the categories, and still more all the concepts formed by
empirical experience or perception in the sensible world (Anschauung),
have and can have no other use, than to make experience possible. And
if this condition is omitted from the pure concepts of the
understanding, they do not determine any object, and have no meaning
whatever.
But it would be on the other hand a still greater absurdity if we
conceded no things in themselves, or set up our experience for the
only possible mode of knowing things, our way of beholding
(Anschauung) them in space and in time for the only possible way, and
our discursive understanding for the archetype of every possible
understanding; in fact if we wished to have the principles of the
possibility of experience considered universal conditions of things in
themselves.
Our principles, which limit the use of reason to possible experience,
might in this way become transcendent, and the limits of our reason be
set up as limits of the possibility of things in themselves (as Hume's
dialogues may illustrate), if a careful critique did not guard the
bounds of our reason with respect to its empirical use, and set a
limit to its pretensions. Scepticism originally arose from metaphysics
and its licentious dialectics. At first it might, merely to favor the
empirical use of reason, announce everything that transcends this use
as worthless and deceitful; but by and by, when it was perceived that
the very same principles that are used in experience, insensibly, and
apparently with the same right, led still further than experience
extends, then men began to doubt even the propositions of experience.
But here there is no danger; for common sense will doubtless always
assert its rights. A certain confusion, however, arose in science
which cannot determine how far reason is to be trusted, and why only
so far and no further, and this confusion can only be cleared up and
all future relapses obviated by a formal determination, on principle,
of the boundary of the use of our reason.
We cannot indeed, beyond all possible experience, form a definite
notion of what things in themselves may be. Yet we are not at liberty
to abstain entirely from inquiring into them; for experience never
satisfies reason fully, but in answering questions, refers us further
and further back, and leaves us dissatisfied with regard to their
complete solution. This any one may gather from the Dialectics of pure
reason, which therefore has its good subjective grounds. Having
acquired, as regards the nature of our soul, a clear conception of the
subject, and having come to the conviction, that its manifestations
cannot be explained materialistically, who can refrain from asking
what the soul really is, and, if no concept of experience suffices for
the purpose, from accounting for it by a concept of reason (that of a
simple immaterial being), though we cannot by any means prove its
objective reality? Who can satisfy himself with mere empirical
knowledge in all the cosmological questions of the duration and of the
quantity of the world, of freedom or of natural necessity, since every
answer given on principles of experience begets a fresh question,
which likewise requires its answer and thereby clearly shows the
insufficiency of all physical modes of explanation to satisfy reason?
Finally, who does not see in the thorough-going contingency and
dependence of all his thoughts and assumptions on mere principles of
experience, the impossibility of stopping there? And who does not feel
himself compelled, notwithstanding all interdictions against losing
himself in transcendent ideas, to seek rest and contentment beyond all
the concepts which he can vindicate by experience, in the concept of a
Being, the possibility of which we cannot conceive, but at the same
time cannot be refuted, because it relates to a mere being of the
understanding, and without it reason must needs remain forever
dissatisfied?
Bounds (in extended beings) always presuppose a space existing outside
a certain definite place, and in closing it; limits do not require
this, but are mere negations, which affect a quantity, so far as it is
not absolutely complete. But our reason, as it were, sees in its
surroundings a space for the cognition of things in themselves, though
we can never have definite notions of them, and are limited to
appearances only.
As long as the cognition of reason is homogeneous, definite bounds to
it are inconceivable. In mathematics and in natural philosophy human
reason admits of limits, but not of bounds, viz., that something
indeed lies without it, at which it can never arrive, but not that it
will at any point find completion in its internal progress. The
enlarging of our views in mathematics, and the possibility of new
discoveries, are infinite; and the same is the case with the discovery
of new properties of nature, of new powers and laws, by continued
experience and its rational combination. But limits cannot be mistaken
here, for mathematics refers to appearances only, and what cannot be
an object of sensuous contemplation, such as the concepts of
metaphysics and of morals, lies entirely without its sphere, and it
can never lead to them; neither does it require them. It is therefore
not a continual progress and an approximation towards these sciences,
and there is not, as it were, any point or line of contact. Natural
science will never reveal to us the internal constitution of things,
which though not appearance, yet can serve as the ultimate ground of
explaining appearance. Nor does that science require this for its
physical explanations. Nay even if such grounds should be offered from
other sources (for instance, the influence of immaterial beings), they
must be rejected and not used in the progress of its explanations. For
these explanations must only be grounded upon that which as an object
of sense can belong to experience, and be brought into connexion with
our actual perceptions and empirical laws.
But metaphysics leads us towards bounds in the dialectical attempts of
pure reason (not undertaken arbitrarily or wantonly, but stimulated
thereto by the nature of reason itself). And the transcendental Ideas,
as they do not admit of evasion, and are never capable of realisation,
serve to point out to us actually not only the bounds of the pure use
of reason, but also the way to determine them. Such is the end and the
use of this natural predisposition of our reason, which has brought
forth metaphysics as its favorite child, whose generation, like every
other in the world, is not to be ascribed to blind chance, but to an
original germ, wisely organised for great ends. For metaphysics, in
its fundamental features, perhaps more than any other science, is
placed in us by nature itself, and cannot be considered the production
of an arbitrary choice or a casual enlargement in the progress of
experience from which it is quite disparate.
Reason with all its concepts and laws of the understanding, which
suffice for empirical use, i.e., within the sensible world, finds in
itself no satisfaction because ever-recurring questions deprive us of
all hope of their complete solution. The transcendental ideas, which
have that completion in view, are such problems of reason. But it sees
clearly, that the sensuous world cannot contain this completion,
neither consequently can all the concepts, which serve merely for
understanding the world of sense, such as space and time, and whatever
we have adduced under the name of pure concepts of the understanding.
The sensuous world is nothing but a chain of appearances connected
according to universal laws; it has therefore no subsistence by
itself; it is not the thing in itself, and consequently must point to
that which contains the basis of this experience, to beings which
cannot be cognised merely as phenomena, but as things in themselves.
In the cognition of them alone reason can hope to satisfy its desire
of completeness in proceeding from the conditioned to its conditions.
We have above (§§ 33, 34) indicated the limits of reason with regard
to all cognition of mere creations of thought. Now, since the
transcendental ideas have urged us to approach them, and thus have led
us, as it were, to the spot where the occupied space (viz.,
experience) touches the void (that of which we can know nothing, viz.,
noumena), we can determine the bounds of pure reason. For in all
bounds there is something positive (e.g., a surface is the boundary of
corporeal space, and is therefore itself a space, a line is a space,
which is the boundary of the surface, a point the boundary of the
line, but yet always a place in space), whereas limits contain mere
negations. The limits pointed out in those paragraphs are not enough
after we have discovered that beyond them there still lies something
(though we can never cognise what it is in itself). For the question
now is, What is the attitude of our reason in this connexion of what
we know with what we do not, and never shall, know? This is an actual
connexion of a known thing with one quite unknown (and which will
always remain so), and though what is unknown should not become the
least more known—which we cannot even hope—yet the notion of this
connexion must be definite, and capable of being rendered distinct.
We must therefore accept an immaterial being, a world of
understanding, and a Supreme Being (all mere noumena), because in them
only, as things in themselves, reason finds that completion and
satisfaction, which it can never hope for in the derivation of
appearances from their homogeneous grounds, and because these actually
have reference to something distinct from them (and totally
heterogeneous), as appearances always presuppose an object in itself,
and therefore suggest its existence whether we can know more of it or
not.
But as we can never cognise these beings of understanding as they are
in themselves, that is, definitely, yet must assume them as regards
the sensible world, and connect them with it by reason, we are at
least able to think this connexion by means of such concepts as
express their relation to the world of sense. Yet if we represent to
ourselves a being of the understanding by nothing but pure concepts of
the understanding, we then indeed represent nothing definite to
ourselves, consequently our concept has no significance; but if we
think it by properties borrowed from the sensuous world, it is no
longer a being of understanding, but is conceived as an appearance,
and belongs to the sensible world. Let us take an instance from the
notion of the Supreme Being.
Our deistic conception is quite a pure concept of reason, but
represents only a thing containing all realities, without being able
to determine any one of them; because for that purpose an example must
be taken from the world of sense, in which case we should have an
object of sense only, not something quite heterogeneous, which can
never be an object of sense. Suppose I attribute to the Supreme Being
understanding, for instance; I have no concept of an understanding
other than my own, one that must receive its perceptions (Anschauung)
by the senses, and which is occupied in bringing them under rules of
the unity of consciousness. Then the elements of my concept would
always lie in the appearance; I should however by the insufficiency of
the appearance be necessitated to go beyond them to the concept of a
being which neither depends upon appearance, nor is bound up with them
as conditions of its determination. But if I separate understanding
from sensibility to obtain a pure understanding, then nothing remains
but the mere form of thinking without perception (Anschauung), by
which form alone I can cognise nothing definite, and consequently no
object. For that purpose I should conceive another understanding, such
as would directly perceive its objects,{39} but of which I have not the
least notion; because the human understanding is discursive, and can
[not directly perceive, it can] only cognise by means of general
concepts. And the very same difficulties arise if we attribute a will
to the Supreme Being; for we have this concept only by drawing it from
our internal experience, and therefore from our dependence for
satisfaction upon objects whose existence we require; and so the
notion rests upon sensibility, which is absolutely incompatible with
the pure concept of the Supreme Being.
===================================
{39} Der die Gegenstände anschaute.
===================================
Hume's objections to deism are weak, and affect only the proofs, and
not the deistic assertion itself. But as regards theism, which depends
on a stricter determination of the concept of the Supreme Being which
in deism is merely transcendent, they are very strong, and as this
concept is formed, in certain (in fact in all common) cases
irrefutable. Hume always insists, that by the mere concept of an
original being, to which we apply only ontological predicates
(eternity, omnipresence, omnipotence), we think nothing definite, and
that properties which can yield a concept in concreto must be
superadded; that it is not enough to say, it is Cause, but we must
explain the nature of its causality, for example, that of an
understanding and of a will. He then begins his attacks on the
essential point itself, i.e., theism, as he had previously directed
his battery only against the proofs of deism, an attack which is not
very dangerous to it in its consequences. All his dangerous arguments
refer to anthropomorphism, which he holds to be inseparable from
theism, and to make it absurd in itself; but if the former be
abandoned, the latter must vanish with it, and nothing remain but
deism, of which nothing can come, which is of no value, and which
cannot serve as any foundation to religion or morals. If this
anthropomorphism were really unavoidable, no proofs whatever of the
existence of a Supreme Being, even were they all granted, could
determine for us the concept of this Being without involving us in
contradictions.
If we connect with the command to avoid all transcendent judgments of
pure reason, the command (which apparently conflicts with it) to
proceed to concepts that lie beyond the field of its immanent
(empirical) use, we discover that both can subsist together, but only
at the boundary of all lawful use of reason. For this boundary belongs
as well to the field of experience, as to that of the creations of
thought, and we are thereby taught, as well, how these so remarkable
ideas serve merely for marking the bounds of human reason. On the one
hand they give warning not boundlessly to extend cognition of
experience, as if nothing but world{40} remained for us to cognise, and
yet, on the other hand, not to transgress the bounds of experience,
and to think of judging about things beyond them, as things in
themselves.
===================================
{40} The use of the word "world" without article, though odd, seems to
be the correct reading, but it may be a mere misprint.— Ed.
===================================
But we stop at this boundary if we limit our judgment merely to the
relation which the world may have to a Being whose very concept lies
beyond all the knowledge which we can attain within the world. For we
then do not attribute to the Supreme Being any of the properties in
themselves, by which we represent objects of experience, and thereby
avoid dogmatic anthropomorphism; but we attribute them to his relation
to the world, and allow ourselves a symbolical anthropomorphism, which
in fact concerns language only, and not the object itself.
If I say that we are compelled to consider the world, as if it were
the work of a Supreme Understanding and Will, I really say nothing
more, than that a watch, a ship, a regiment, bears the same relation
to the watchmaker, the shipbuilder, the commanding officer, as the
world of sense (or whatever constitutes the substratum of this complex
of appearances) does to the Unknown, which I do not hereby cognise as
it is in itself, but as it is for me or in relation to the world, of
which I am a part.
§ 58. Such a cognition is one of analogy, and does not signify (as is
commonly understood) an imperfect similarity of two things, but a
perfect similarity of relations between two quite dissimilar things.{41}
By means of this analogy, however, there remains a concept of the
Supreme Being sufficiently determined for us, though we have left out
everything that could deter mine it absolutely or in itself; for we
determine it as regards the world and as regards ourselves, and more
do we not require. The attacks which Hume makes upon those who would
determine this concept absolutely, by taking the materials for so
doing from themselves and the world, do not affect us; and he cannot
object to us, that we have nothing left if we give up the objective
anthropomorphism of the concept of the Supreme Being.
===================================
{41} There is, e.g., an analogy between the juridical relation of human
actions and the mechanical relation of motive powers. I never can do
anything to another man without giving him a right to do the same to
me on the same conditions; just as no mass can act with its motive
power on another mass without thereby occasioning the other to react
equally against it. Here right and motive power are quite dissimilar
things, but in their relation there is complete similarity. By means
of such an analogy I can obtain a notion of the relation of things
which absolutely are unknown to me. For instance, as the promotion of
the welfare of children (= a) is to the love of parents (= b), so the
welfare of the human species (= c) is to that unknown [quantity which
is] in God (= x), which we call love; not as if it had the least
similarity to any human inclination, but because we can suppose its
relation to the world to be similar to that which things of the world
bear one another. But the concept of relation in this case is a mere
category, viz., the concept of cause, which has nothing to do with
sensibility.
===================================
For let us assume at the outset (as Hume in his dialogues makes Philo
grant Cleanthes), as a necessary hypothesis, the deistical concept of
the First Being, in which this Being is thought by the mere
ontological predicates of substance, of cause, etc. This must be done,
because reason, actuated in the sensible world by mere conditions,
which are themselves always conditional, cannot otherwise have any
satisfaction, and it therefore can be done without falling into
anthropomorphism (which transfers predicates from the world of sense
to a Being quite distinct from the world), because those predicates
are mere categories, which, though they do not give a determinate
concept of God, yet give a concept not limited to any conditions of
sensibility. Thus nothing can prevent our predicating of this Being a
causality through reason with regard to the world, and thus passing to
theism, without being obliged to attribute to God in himself this kind
of reason, as a property inhering in him. For as to the former, the
only possible way of prosecuting the use of reason (as regards all
possible experience, in complete harmony with itself) in the world of
sense to the highest point, is to assume a supreme reason as a cause
of all the connexions in the world. Such a principle must be quite
advantageous to reason and can hurt it nowhere in its application to
nature. As to the latter, reason is thereby not transferred as a
property to the First Being in himself, but only to his relation to
the world of sense, and so anthropomorphism is entirely avoided. For
nothing is considered here but the cause of the form of reason which
is perceived everywhere in the world, and reason is attributed to the
Supreme Being, so far as it contains the ground of this form of reason
in the world, but according to analogy only, that is, so far as this
expression shows merely the relation, which the Supreme Cause unknown
to us has to the world, in order to determine everything in it
conformably to reason in the highest degree. We are thereby kept from
using reason as an attribute for the purpose of conceiving God, but
instead of conceiving the world in such a manner as is necessary to
have the greatest possible use of reason according to principle. We
thereby acknowledge that the Supreme Being is quite inscrutable and
even unthinkable in any definite way as to what he is in himself. We
are thereby kept, on the one hand, from making a transcendent use of
the concepts which we have of reason as an efficient cause (by means
of the will), in order to determine the Divine Nature by properties,
which are only borrowed from human nature, and from losing ourselves
in gross and extravagant notions, and on the other hand from deluging
the contemplation of the world with hyperphysical modes of explanation
according to our notions of human reason, which we transfer to God,
and so losing for this contemplation its proper application, according
to which it should be a rational study of mere nature, and not a
presumptuous derivation of its appearances from a Supreme Reason. The
expression suited to our feeble notions is, that we conceive the world
as if it came, as to its existence and internal plan, from a Supreme
Reason, by which notion we both cognise the constitution, which
belongs to the world itself, yet without pretending to determine the
nature of its cause in itself, and on the other hand, we transfer the
ground of this constitution (of the form of reason in the world) upon
the relation of the Supreme Cause to the world, without finding the
world sufficient by itself for that purpose.{42}
===================================
{42} I may say, that the causality of the Supreme Cause holds the same
place with regard to the world that human reason does with regard to
its works of art. Here the nature of the Supreme Cause itself remains
unknown to me: I only compare its effects (the order of the world)
which I know, and their conformity to reason, to the effects of human
reason which I also know; and hence I term the former reason, without
attributing to it on that account what I understand in man by this
term, or attaching to it anything else known to me, as its property.
===================================
Thus the difficulties which seem to oppose theism disappear by
combining with Hume's principle—"not to carry the use of reason
dogmatically beyond the field of all possible experience"—this other
principle, which he quite overlooked: "not to consider the field of
experience as one which bounds itself in the eye of our reason." The
Critique of Pure Reason here points out the true mean between
dogmatism, which Hume combats, and skepticism, which he would
substitute for it—a mean which is not like other means that we find
advisable to determine for ourselves as it were mechanically (by
adopting something from one side and something from the other), and by
which nobody is taught a better way, but such a one as can be
accurately determined on principles.
§ 59. At the beginning of this annotation I made use of the metaphor
of a boundary, in order to establish the limits of reason in regard to
its suitable use. The world of sense contains merely appearances,
which are not things in themselves, but the understanding must assume
these latter ones, viz., noumena. In our reason both are comprised,
and the question is, How does reason proceed to set boundaries to the
understanding as regards both these fields? Experience, which contains
all that belongs to the sensuous world, does not bound itself; it only
proceeds in every case from the conditioned to some other equally
conditioned object. Its boundary must lie quite without it, and this
field is that of the pure beings of the understanding. But this field,
so far as the determination of the nature of these beings is
concerned, is an empty space for us, and if dogmatically-determined
concepts alone are in question, we cannot pass out of the field of
possible experience. But as a boundary itself is something positive,
which belongs as well to that which lies within, as to the space that
lies without the given complex, it is still an actual positive
cognition, which reason only acquires by enlarging itself to this
boundary, yet without attempting to pass it; because it there finds
itself in the presence of an empty space, in which it can conceive
forms of things, but not things themselves. But the setting of a
boundary to the field of the understanding by something, which is
otherwise unknown to it, is still a cognition which belongs to reason
even at this standpoint, and by which it is neither confined within
the sensible, nor straying without it, but only refers, as befits the
knowledge of a boundary, to the relation between that which lies
without it, and that which is contained within it.
Natural theology is such a concept at the boundary of human reason,
being constrained to look beyond this boundary to the Idea of a
Supreme Being (and, for practical purposes to that of an intelligible
world also), not in order to determine anything relatively to this
pure creation of the understanding, which lies beyond the world of
sense, but in order to guide the use of reason within it according to
principles of the greatest possible (theoretical as well as practical)
unity. For this purpose we make use of the reference of the world of
sense to an independent reason, as the cause of all its connexions.
Thereby we do not purely invent a being, but, as beyond the sensible
world there must be something that can only be thought by the pure
understanding, we determine that something in this particular way,
though only of course according to analogy.
And thus there remains our original proposition, which is the résumé
of the whole Critique: "that reason by all its a priori principles
never teaches us anything more than objects of possible experience,
and even of these nothing more than can be cognised in experience."
But this limitation does not prevent reason leading us to the
objective boundary of experience, viz., to the reference to something
which is not itself an object of experience, but is the ground of all
experience. Reason does not however teach us anything concerning the
thing in itself: it only instructs us as regards its own complete and
highest use in the field of possible experience. But this is all that
can be reasonably desired in the present case, and with which we have
cause to be satisfied.
§ 60. Thus we have fully exhibited metaphysics as it is actually
given in the natural predisposition of human reason, and in that which
constitutes the essential end of its pursuit, according to its
subjective possibility. Though we have found, that this merely natural
use of such a predisposition of our reason, if no discipline arising
only from a scientific critique bridles and sets limits to it,
involves us in transcendent, either apparently or really conflicting,
dialectical syllogisms; and this fallacious metaphysics is not only
unnecessary as regards the promotion of our knowledge of nature, but
even disadvantageous to it: there yet remains a problem worthy of
solution, which is to find out the natural ends intended by this
disposition to transcendent concepts in our reason, because everything
that lies in nature must be originally intended for some useful
purpose.
Such an inquiry is of a doubtful nature; and I acknowledge, that what
I can say about it is conjecture only, like every speculation about
the first ends of nature. The question does not concern the objective
validity of metaphysical judgments, but our natural predisposition to
them, and therefore does not belong to the system of metaphysics but
to anthropology.
When I compare all the transcendental Ideas, the totality of which
constitutes the particular problem of natural pure reason, compelling
it to quit the mere contemplation of nature, to transcend all possible
experience, and in this endeavor to produce the thing (be it knowledge
or fiction) called metaphysics, I think I perceive that the aim of
this natural tendency is, to free our notions from the fetters of
experience and from the limits of the mere contemplation of nature so
far as at least to open to us a field containing mere objects for the
pure understanding, which no sensibility can reach, not indeed for the
purpose of speculatively occupying ourselves with them (for there we
can find no ground to stand on), but because practical principles,
which, without finding some such scope for their necessary expectation
and hope, could not expand to the universality which reason
unavoidably requires from a moral point of view.
So I find that the Psychological Idea (however little it may reveal to
me the nature of the human soul, which is higher than all concepts of
experience), shows the insufficiency of these concepts plainly enough,
and thereby deters me from materialism, the psychological notion of
which is unfit for any explanation of nature, and besides confines
reason in practical respects. The Cosmological Ideas, by the obvious
insufficiency of all possible cognition of nature to satisfy reason in
its lawful inquiry, serve in the same manner to keep us from
naturalism, which asserts nature to be sufficient for itself. Finally,
all natural necessity in the sensible world is conditional, as it
always presupposes the dependence of things upon others, and
unconditional necessity must be sought only in the unity of a cause
different from the world of sense. But as the causality of this cause,
in its turn, were it merely nature, could never render the existence
of the contingent (as its consequent) comprehensible, reason frees
itself by means of the Theological Idea from fatalism, (both as a
blind natural necessity in the coherence of nature itself, without a
first principle, and as a blind causality of this principle itself),
and leads to the concept of a cause possessing freedom, or of a
Supreme Intelligence. Thus the transcendental Ideas serve, if not to
instruct us positively, at least to destroy the rash assertions of
Materialism, of Naturalism, and of Fatalism, and thus to afford scope
for the moral Ideas beyond the field of speculation. These
considerations, I should think, explain in some measure the natural
predisposition of which I spoke.
The practical value, which a merely speculative science may have, lies
without the bounds of this science, and can therefore be considered as
a scholion merely, and like all scholia does not form part of the
science itself. This application however surely lies within the bounds
of philosophy, especially of philosophy drawn from the pure sources of
reason, where its speculative use in metaphysics must necessarily be
at unity with its practical use in morals. Hence the unavoidable
dialectics of pure reason, considered in metaphysics, as a natural
tendency, deserves to be explained not as an illusion merely, which is
to be removed, but also, if possible, as a natural provision as
regards its end, though this duty, a work of supererogation, cannot
justly be assigned to metaphysics proper.
The solutions of these questions which are treated in the chapter on
the Regulative Use of the Ideas of Pure Reason{43} should be considered
a second scholion which however has a greater affinity with the
subject of metaphysics. For there certain rational principles are
expounded which determine a priori the order of nature or rather of
the understanding, which seeks nature's laws through experience. They
seem to be constitutive and legislative with regard to experience,
though they spring from pure reason, which cannot be considered, like
the understanding, as a principle of possible experience. Now whether
or not this harmony rests upon the fact, that just as nature does not
inhere in appearances or in their source (the sensibility) itself, but
only in so far as the latter is in relation to the understanding, as
also a systematic unity in applying the understanding to bring about
an entirety of all possible experience can only belong to the
understanding when in relation to reason; and whether or not
experience is in this way mediately subordinate to the legislation of
reason: may be discussed by those who desire to trace the nature of
reason even beyond its use in metaphysics, into the general principles
of a history of nature; I have represented this task as important, but
not attempted its solution, in the book itself.{44}
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{43} Critique of Pure Reason, II., chap. III., section 7.
{44} Throughout in the Critique I never lost sight of the plan not to
neglect anything, were it ever so recondite, that could render the
inquiry into the nature of pure reason complete. Everybody may
afterwards carry his researches as far as he pleases, when he has been
merely shown what yet remains to be done. It is this a duty which must
reasonably be expected of him who has made it his business to survey
the whole field, in order to consign it to others for future
cultivation and allotment. And to this branch both the scholia belong,
which will hardly recommend themselves by their dryness to amateurs,
and hence are added here for connoisseurs only.
===================================
And thus I conclude the analytical solution of the main question which
I had proposed: How is metaphysics in general possible? by ascending
from the data of its actual use in its consequences, to the grounds of
its possibility.