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CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON

II. Solution of the Cosmological Idea of the Totality of the Division of a Whole given in Intuition.

When I divide a whole which is given in intuition, I proceed from
a conditioned to its conditions. The division of the parts of the
whole (subdivisio or decompositio) is a regress in the series of these
conditions. The absolute totality of this series would be actually
attained and given to the mind, if the regress could arrive at
simple parts. But if all the parts in a continuous decomposition are
themselves divisible, the division, that is to say, the regress,
proceeds from the conditioned to its conditions in infinitum;
because the conditions (the parts) are themselves contained in the
conditioned, and, as the latter is given in a limited intuition, the
former are all given along with it. This regress cannot, therefore,
be called a regressus in indefinitum, as happened in the case of the
preceding cosmological idea, the regress in which proceeded from the
conditioned to the conditions not given contemporaneously and along
with it, but discoverable only through the empirical regress. We are
not, however, entitled to affirm of a whole of this kind, which is
divisible in infinitum, that it consists of an infinite number of
parts. For, although all the parts are contained in the intuition of
the whole, the whole division is not contained therein. The division
is contained only in the progressing decomposition--in the regress
itself, which is the condition of the possibility and actuality of
the series. Now, as this regress is infinite, all the members (parts)
to which it attains must be contained in the given whole as an aggregate.
But the complete series of division is not contained therein. For this
series, being infinite in succession and always incomplete, cannot
represent an infinite number of members, and still less a
composition of these members into a whole.

To apply this remark to space. Every limited part of space presented
to intuition is a whole, the parts of which are always spaces--to
whatever extent subdivided. Every limited space is hence divisible
to infinity.

Let us again apply the remark to an external phenomenon enclosed
in limits, that is, a body. The divisibility of a body rests upon
the divisibility of space, which is the condition of the possibility
of the body as an extended whole. A body is consequently divisible
to infinity, though it does not, for that reason, consist of an
infinite number of parts.

It certainly seems that, as a body must be cogitated as substance in
space, the law of divisibility would not be applicable to it as
substance. For we may and ought to grant, in the case of space, that
division or decomposition, to any extent, never can utterly annihilate
composition (that is to say, the smallest part of space must still
consist of spaces); otherwise space would entirely cease to exist-
which is impossible. But, the assertion on the other band that when
all composition in matter is annihilated in thought, nothing
remains, does not seem to harmonize with the conception of
substance, which must be properly the subject of all composition and
must remain, even after the conjunction of its attributes in space-
which constituted a body--is annihilated in thought. But this is not
the case with substance in the phenomenal world, which is not a
thing in itself cogitated by the pure category. Phenomenal substance
is not an absolute subject; it is merely a permanent sensuous image,
and nothing more than an intuition, in which the unconditioned is
not to be found.

But, although this rule of progress to infinity is legitimate and
applicable to the subdivision of a phenomenon, as a mere occupation
or filling of space, it is not applicable to a whole consisting of
a number of distinct parts and constituting a quantum discretum--that
is to say, an organized body. It cannot be admitted that every part
in an organized whole is itself organized, and that, in analysing it
to infinity, we must always meet with organized parts; although we
may allow that the parts of the matter which we decompose in infinitum,
may be organized. For the infinity of the division of a phenomenon
in space rests altogether on the fact that the divisibility of a
phenomenon is given only in and through this infinity, that is, an
undetermined number of parts is given, while the parts themselves
are given and determined only in and through the subdivision; in a
word, the infinity of the division necessarily presupposes that the
whole is not already divided in se. Hence our division determines a
number of parts in the whole--a number which extends just as far as
the actual regress in the division; while, on the other hand, the very
notion of a body organized to infinity represents the whole as already
and in itself divided. We expect, therefore, to find in it a
determinate, but at the same time, infinite, number of parts--which
is self-contradictory. For we should thus have a whole containing a
series of members which could not be completed in any regress--which
is infinite, and at the same time complete in an organized
composite. Infinite divisibility is applicable only to a quantum
continuum, and is based entirely on the infinite divisibility of
space, But in a quantum discretum the multitude of parts or units is
always determined, and hence always equal to some number. To what
extent a body may be organized, experience alone can inform us; and
although, so far as our experience of this or that body has
extended, we may not have discovered any inorganic part, such parts
must exist in possible experience. But how far the transcendental
division of a phenomenon must extend, we cannot know from
experience--it is a question which experience cannot answer; it is
answered only by the principle of reason which forbids us to
consider the empirical regress, in the analysis of extended body, as
ever absolutely complete.

Concluding Remark on the Solution of the Transcendental Mathematical Ideas -- and Introductory to the Solution of the Dynamical Ideas.

We presented the antinomy of pure reason in a tabular form, and we
endeavoured to show the ground of this self-contradiction on the
part of reason, and the only means of bringing it to a conclusion--
namely, by declaring both contradictory statements to be false. We
represented in these antinomies the conditions of phenomena as
belonging to the conditioned according to relations of space and time-
which is the usual supposition of the common understanding. In this
respect, all dialectical representations of totality, in the series
of conditions to a given conditioned, were perfectly homogeneous. The
condition was always a member of the series along with the
conditioned, and thus the homogeneity of the whole series was assured.
In this case the regress could never be cogitated as complete; or,
if this was the case, a member really conditioned was falsely regarded
as a primal member, consequently as unconditioned. In such an
antinomy, therefore, we did not consider the object, that is, the
conditioned, but the series of conditions belonging to the object,
and the magnitude of that series. And thus arose the difficulty--a
difficulty not to be settled by any decision regarding the claims of
the two parties, but simply by cutting the knot--by declaring the
series proposed by reason to be either too long or too short for the
understanding, which could in neither case make its conceptions
adequate with the ideas.

But we have overlooked, up to this point, an essential difference
existing between the conceptions of the understanding which reason
endeavours to raise to the rank of ideas--two of these indicating a
mathematical, and two a dynamical synthesis of phenomena. Hitherto,
it was necessary to signalize this distinction; for, just as in our
general representation of all transcendental ideas, we considered them
under phenomenal conditions, so, in the two mathematical ideas, our
discussion is concerned solely with an object in the world of
phenomena. But as we are now about to proceed to the consideration
of the dynamical conceptions of the understanding, and their
adequateness with ideas, we must not lose sight of this distinction.
We shall find that it opens up to us an entirely new view of the
conflict in which reason is involved. For, while in the first two
antinomies, both parties were dismissed, on the ground of having
advanced statements based upon false hypothesis; in the present case
the hope appears of discovering a hypothesis which may be consistent
with the demands of reason, and, the judge completing the statement
of the grounds of claim, which both parties had left in an unsatisfactory
state, the question may be settled on its own merits, not by
dismissing the claimants, but by a comparison of the arguments on both
sides. If we consider merely their extension, and whether they are
adequate with ideas, the series of conditions may be regarded as all
homogeneous. But the conception of the understanding which lies at
the basis of these ideas, contains either a synthesis of the homogeneous
(presupposed in every quantity--in its composition as well as in its
division) or of the heterogeneous, which is the case in the
dynamical synthesis of cause and effect, as well as of the necessary
and the contingent.

Thus it happens that in the mathematical series of phenomena no
other than a sensuous condition is admissible--a condition which is
itself a member of the series; while the dynamical series of
sensuous conditions admits a heterogeneous condition, which is not
a member of the series, but, as purely intelligible, lies out of and
beyond it. And thus reason is satisfied, and an unconditioned placed
at the head of the series of phenomena, without introducing
confusion into or discontinuing it, contrary to the principles of
the understanding.

Now, from the fact that the dynamical ideas admit a condition of
phenomena which does not form a part of the series of phenomena,
arises a result which we should not have expected from an antinomy.
In former cases, the result was that both contradictory dialectical
statements were declared to be false. In the present case, we find
the conditioned in the dynamical series connected with an empirically
unconditioned, but non-sensuous condition; and thus satisfaction is
done to the understanding on the one hand and to the reason on the
other.* While, moreover, the dialectical arguments for unconditioned
totality in mere phenomena fall to the ground, both propositions of
reason may be shown to be true in their proper signification. This
could not happen in the case of the cosmological ideas which
demanded a mathematically unconditioned unity; for no condition
could be placed at the head of the series of phenomena, except one
which was itself a phenomenon and consequently a member of the series.

[*Footnote: For the understanding cannot admit among phenomena a condition
which is itself empirically unconditioned. But if it is possible to
cogitate an intelligible condition--one which is not a member of the
series of phenomena--for a conditioned phenomenon, without breaking
the series of empirical conditions, such a condition may be admissible
as empirically unconditioned, and the empirical regress continue
regular, unceasing, and intact.]

III. Solution of the Cosmological Idea of the Totality of the Deduction of Cosmical Events from their Causes.

There are only two modes of causality cogitable--the causality of
nature or of freedom. The first is the conjunction of a particular
state with another preceding it in the world of sense, the former
following the latter by virtue of a law. Now, as the causality of
phenomena is subject to conditions of time, and the preceding state,
if it had always existed, could not have produced an effect which
would make its first appearance at a particular time, the causality
of a cause must itself be an effect--must itself have begun to be,
and therefore, according to the principle of the understanding, itself
requires a cause.

We must understand, on the contrary, by the term freedom, in the
cosmological sense, a faculty of the spontaneous origination of a
state; the causality of which, therefore, is not subordinated to
another cause determining it in time. Freedom is in this sense a
pure transcendental idea, which, in the first place, contains no
empirical element; the object of which, in the second place, cannot
be given or determined in any experience, because it is a universal
law of the very possibility of experience, that everything which happens
must have a cause, that consequently the causality of a cause, being
itself something that has happened, must also have a cause. In this
view of the case, the whole field of experience, how far soever it
may extend, contains nothing that is not subject to the laws of nature.
But, as we cannot by this means attain to an absolute totality of
conditions in reference to the series of causes and effects, reason
creates the idea of a spontaneity, which can begin to act of itself,
and without any external cause determining it to action, according
to the natural law of causality.

It is especially remarkable that the practical conception of freedom
is based upon the transcendental idea, and that the question of the
possibility of the former is difficult only as it involves the
consideration of the truth of the latter. Freedom, in the practical
sense, is the independence of the will of coercion by sensuous
impulses. A will is sensuous, in so far as it is pathologically
affected (by sensuous impulses); it is termed animal (arbitrium
brutum), when it is pathologically necessitated. The human will is
certainly an arbitrium sensitivum, not brutum, but liberum; because
sensuousness does not necessitate its action, a faculty existing in
man of self-determination, independently of all sensuous coercion.

It is plain that, if all causality in the world of sense were
natural--and natural only--every event would be determined by
another according to necessary laws, and that, consequently,
phenomena, in so far as they determine the will, must necessitate
every action as a natural effect from themselves; and thus all
practical freedom would fall to the ground with the transcendental
idea. For the latter presupposes that although a certain thing has
not happened, it ought to have happened, and that, consequently, its
phenomenal cause was not so powerful and determinative as to exclude
the causality of our will--a causality capable of producing effects
independently of and even in opposition to the power of natural
causes, and capable, consequently, of spontaneously originating a
series of events.

Here, too, we find it to be the case, as we generally found in the
self-contradictions and perplexities of a reason which strives to pass
the bounds of possible experience, that the problem is properly not
physiological, but transcendental. The question of the possibility
of freedom does indeed concern psychology; but, as it rests upon
dialectical arguments of pure reason, its solution must engage the
attention of transcendental philosophy. Before attempting this
solution, a task which transcendental philosophy cannot decline, it
will be advisable to make a remark with regard to its procedure in
the settlement of the question.

If phenomena were things in themselves, and time and space forms
of the existence of things, condition and conditioned would always
be members of the same series; and thus would arise in the present
case the antinomy common to all transcendental ideas--that their
series is either too great or too small for the understanding. The
dynamical ideas, which we are about to discuss in this and the
following section, possess the peculiarity of relating to an object,
not considered as a quantity, but as an existence; and thus, in the
discussion of the present question, we may make abstraction of the
quantity of the series of conditions, and consider merely the
dynamical relation of the condition to the conditioned. The
question, then, suggests itself, whether freedom is possible; and,
if it is, whether it can consist with the universality of the
natural law of causality; and, consequently, whether we enounce a
proper disjunctive proposition when we say: "Every effect must have
its origin either in nature or in freedom," or whether both cannot
exist together in the same event in different relations. The principle
of an unbroken connection between all events in the phenomenal
world, in accordance with the unchangeable laws of nature, is a
well-established principle of transcendental analytic which admits
of no exception. The question, therefore, is: "Whether an effect,
determined according to the laws of nature, can at the same time be
produced by a free agent, or whether freedom and nature mutually
exclude each other?" And here, the common but fallacious hypothesis
of the absolute reality of phenomena manifests its injurious influence
in embarrassing the procedure of reason. For if phenomena are things
in themselves, freedom is impossible. In this case, nature is the
complete and all-sufficient cause of every event; and condition and
conditioned, cause and effect are contained in the same series, and
necessitated by the same law. If, on the contrary, phenomena are
held to be, as they are in fact, nothing more than mere
representations, connected with each other in accordance with
empirical laws, they must have a ground which is not phenomenal. But
the causality of such an intelligible cause is not determined or
determinable by phenomena; although its effects, as phenomena, must
be determined by other phenomenal existences. This cause and its
causality exist therefore out of and apart from the series of
phenomena; while its effects do exist and are discoverable in the
series of empirical conditions. Such an effect may therefore be
considered to be free in relation to its intelligible cause, and
necessary in relation to the phenomena from which it is a necessary
consequence--a distinction which, stated in this perfectly general
and abstract manner, must appear in the highest degree subtle and obscure.
The sequel will explain. It is sufficient, at present, to remark that,
as the complete and unbroken connection of phenomena is an unalterable
law of nature, freedom is impossible--on the supposition that
phenomena are absolutely real. Hence those philosophers who adhere
to the common opinion on this subject can never succeed in reconciling
the ideas of nature and freedom.

Possibility of Freedom in Harmony with the Universal Law of Natural Necessity.

That element in a sensuous object which is not itself sensuous, I
may be allowed to term intelligible. If, accordingly, an object
which must be regarded as a sensuous phenomenon possesses a faculty
which is not an object of sensuous intuition, but by means of which
it is capable of being the cause of phenomena, the causality of an
object or existence of this kind may be regarded from two different
points of view. It may be considered to be intelligible, as regards
its action--the action of a thing which is a thing in itself, and
sensuous, as regards its effects--the effects of a phenomenon
belonging to the sensuous world. We should accordingly, have to form
both an empirical and an intellectual conception of the causality of
such a faculty or power--both, however, having reference to the same
effect. This twofold manner of cogitating a power residing in a
sensuous object does not run counter to any of the conceptions which
we ought to form of the world of phenomena or of a possible
experience. Phenomena--not being things in themselves--must have a
transcendental object as a foundation, which determines them as mere
representations; and there seems to be no reason why we should not
ascribe to this transcendental object, in addition to the property
of self-phenomenization, a causality whose effects are to be met
with in the world of phenomena, although it is not itself a
phenomenon. But every effective cause must possess a character, that
is to say, a law of its causality, without which it would cease to
be a cause. In the above case, then, every sensuous object would
possess an empirical character, which guaranteed that its actions,
as phenomena, stand in complete and harmonious connection, conformably
to unvarying natural laws, with all other phenomena, and can be
deduced from these, as conditions, and that they do thus, in
connection with these, constitute a series in the order of nature.
This sensuous object must, in the second place, possess an
intelligible character, which guarantees it to be the cause of those
actions, as phenomena, although it is not itself a phenomenon nor
subordinate to the conditions of the world of sense. The former may
be termed the character of the thing as a phenomenon, the latter the
character of the thing as a thing in itself.

Now this active subject would, in its character of intelligible
subject, be subordinate to no conditions of time, for time is only
a condition of phenomena, and not of things in themselves. No action
would begin or cease to be in this subject; it would consequently be
free from the law of all determination of time--the law of change,
namely, that everything which happens must have a cause in the
phenomena of a preceding state. In one word, the causality of the
subject, in so far as it is intelligible, would not form part of the
series of empirical conditions which determine and necessitate an
event in the world of sense. Again, this intelligible character of
a thing cannot be immediately cognized, because we can perceive
nothing but phenomena, but it must be capable of being cogitated in
harmony with the empirical character; for we always find ourselves
compelled to place, in thought, a transcendental object at the basis
of phenomena although we can never know what this object is in itself.

In virtue of its empirical character, this subject would at the same
time be subordinate to all the empirical laws of causality, and, as
a phenomenon and member of the sensuous world, its effects would
have to be accounted for by a reference to preceding phenomena.
Eternal phenomena must be capable of influencing it; and its
actions, in accordance with natural laws, must explain to us how its
empirical character, that is, the law of its causality, is to be
cognized in and by means of experience. In a word, all requisites
for a complete and necessary determination of these actions must be
presented to us by experience.

In virtue of its intelligible character, on the other hand (although
we possess only a general conception of this character), the subject
must be regarded as free from all sensuous influences, and from all
phenomenal determination. Moreover, as nothing happens in this
subject--for it is a noumenon, and there does not consequently exist
in it any change, demanding the dynamical determination of time, and
for the same reason no connection with phenomena as causes--this
active existence must in its actions be free from and independent of
natural necessity, for or necessity exists only in the world of
phenomena. It would be quite correct to say that it originates or
begins its effects in the world of sense from itself, although the
action productive of these effects does not begin in itself. We should
not be in this case affirming that these sensuous effects began to
exist of themselves, because they are always determined by prior
empirical conditions--by virtue of the empirical character, which is
the phenomenon of the intelligible character--and are possible only
as constituting a continuation of the series of natural causes. And
thus nature and freedom, each in the complete and absolute
signification of these terms, can exist, without contradiction or
disagreement, in the same action.

Exposition of the Cosmological Idea of Freedom in Harmony with the Universal Law of Natural Necessity.

I have thought it advisable to lay before the reader at first merely
a sketch of the solution of this transcendental problem, in order to
enable him to form with greater ease a clear conception of the
course which reason must adopt in the solution. I shall now proceed
to exhibit the several momenta of this solution, and to consider them
in their order.

The natural law that everything which happens must have a cause,
that the causality of this cause, that is, the action of the cause
(which cannot always have existed, but must be itself an event, for
it precedes in time some effect which it has originated), must have
itself a phenomenal cause, by which it is determined and, and,
consequently, all events are empirically determined in an order of
nature--this law, I say, which lies at the foundation of the
possibility of experience, and of a connected system of phenomena or
nature is a law of the understanding, from which no departure, and
to which no exception, can be admitted. For to except even a single
phenomenon from its operation is to exclude it from the sphere of
possible experience and thus to admit it to be a mere fiction of
thought or phantom of the brain.

Thus we are obliged to acknowledge the existence of a chain of
causes, in which, however, absolute totality cannot be found. But we
need not detain ourselves with this question, for it has already
been sufficiently answered in our discussion of the antinomies into
which reason falls, when it attempts to reach the unconditioned in
the series of phenomena. If we permit ourselves to be deceived by the
illusion of transcendental idealism, we shall find that neither nature
nor freedom exists. Now the question is: "Whether, admitting the
existence of natural necessity in the world of phenomena, it is
possible to consider an effect as at the same time an effect of nature
and an effect of freedom--or, whether these two modes of causality
are contradictory and incompatible?"

No phenomenal cause can absolutely and of itself begin a series.
Every action, in so far as it is productive of an event, is itself
an event or occurrence, and presupposes another preceding state, in
which its cause existed. Thus everything that happens is but a
continuation of a series, and an absolute beginning is impossible in
the sensuous world. The actions of natural causes are, accordingly,
themselves effects, and presuppose causes preceding them in time. A
primal action which forms an absolute beginning, is beyond the
causal power of phenomena.

Now, is it absolutely necessary that, granting that all effects
are phenomena, the causality of the cause of these effects must also
be a phenomenon and belong to the empirical world? Is it not rather
possible that, although every effect in the phenomenal world must be
connected with an empirical cause, according to the universal law of
nature, this empirical causality may be itself the effect of a
non-empirical and intelligible causality--its connection with
natural causes remaining nevertheless intact? Such a causality would
be considered, in reference to phenomena, as the primal action of a
cause, which is in so far, therefore, not phenomenal, but, by reason
of this faculty or power, intelligible; although it must, at the
same time, as a link in the chain of nature, be regarded as
belonging to the sensuous world.

A belief in the reciprocal causality of phenomena is necessary, if
we are required to look for and to present the natural conditions of
natural events, that is to say, their causes. This being admitted as
unexceptionably valid, the requirements of the understanding, which
recognizes nothing but nature in the region of phenomena, are
satisfied, and our physical explanations of physical phenomena may
proceed in their regular course, without hindrance and without
opposition. But it is no stumbling-block in the way, even assuming
the idea to be a pure fiction, to admit that there are some natural
causes in the possession of a faculty which is not empirical, but
intelligible, inasmuch as it is not determined to action by
empirical conditions, but purely and solely upon grounds brought
forward by the understanding--this action being still, when the
cause is phenomenized, in perfect accordance with the laws of
empirical causality. Thus the acting subject, as a causal
phenomenon, would continue to preserve a complete connection with
nature and natural conditions; and the phenomenon only of the
subject (with all its phenomenal causality) would contain certain
conditions, which, if we ascend from the empirical to the
transcendental object, must necessarily be regarded as intelligible.
For, if we attend, in our inquiries with regard to causes in the world
of phenomena, to the directions of nature alone, we need not trouble
ourselves about the relation in which the transcendental subject,
which is completely unknown to us, stands to these phenomena and their
connection in nature. The intelligible ground of phenomena in this
subject does not concern empirical questions. It has to do only with
pure thought; and, although the effects of this thought and action
of the pure understanding are discoverable in phenomena, these
phenomena must nevertheless be capable of a full and complete
explanation, upon purely physical grounds and in accordance with
natural laws. And in this case we attend solely to their empirical
and omit all consideration of their intelligible character (which is
the transcendental cause of the former) as completely unknown, except
in so far as it is exhibited by the latter as its empirical symbol.
Now let us apply this to experience. Man is a phenomenon of the sensuous
world and, at the same time, therefore, a natural cause, the causality
of which must be regulated by empirical laws. As such, he must possess
an empirical character, like all other natural phenomena. We remark
this empirical character in his actions, which reveal the presence
of certain powers and faculties. If we consider inanimate or merely
animal nature, we can discover no reason for ascribing to ourselves
any other than a faculty which is determined in a purely sensuous
manner. But man, to whom nature reveals herself only through sense,
cognizes himself not only by his senses, but also through pure
apperception; and this in actions and internal determinations, which
he cannot regard as sensuous impressions. He is thus to himself, on
the one hand, a phenomenon, but on the other hand, in respect of
certain faculties, a purely intelligible object--intelligible, because
its action cannot be ascribed to sensuous receptivity. These faculties
are understanding and reason. The latter, especially, is in a peculiar
manner distinct from all empirically-conditioned faculties, for it
employs ideas alone in the consideration of its objects, and by
means of these determines the understanding, which then proceeds to
make an empirical use of its own conceptions, which, like the ideas
of reason, are pure and non-empirical.

That reason possesses the faculty of causality, or that at least
we are compelled so to represent it, is evident from the
imperatives, which in the sphere of the practical we impose on many
of our executive powers. The words I ought express a species of
necessity, and imply a connection with grounds which nature does not
and cannot present to the mind of man. Understanding knows nothing
in nature but that which is, or has been, or will be. It would be
absurd to say that anything in nature ought to be other than it is
in the relations of time in which it stands; indeed, the ought, when
we consider merely the course of nature, has neither application nor
meaning. The question, "What ought to happen in the sphere of nature?"
is just as absurd as the question, "What ought to be the properties
of a circle?" All that we are entitled to ask is, "What takes place
in nature?" or, in the latter case, "What are the properties of a
circle?"

But the idea of an ought or of duty indicates a possible action, the
ground of which is a pure conception; while the ground of a merely
natural action is, on the contrary, always a phenomenon. This action
must certainly be possible under physical conditions, if it is
prescribed by the moral imperative ought; but these physical or
natural conditions do not concern the determination of the will
itself, they relate to its effects alone, and the consequences of
the effect in the world of phenomena. Whatever number of motives
nature may present to my will, whatever sensuous impulses--the moral
ought it is beyond their power to produce. They may produce a
volition, which, so far from being necessary, is always conditioned--a
volition to which the ought enunciated by reason, sets an aim and a
standard, gives permission or prohibition. Be the object what it
may, purely sensuous--as pleasure, or presented by pure reason--as
good, reason will not yield to grounds which have an empirical origin.
Reason will not follow the order of things presented by experience,
but, with perfect spontaneity, rearranges them according to ideas,
with which it compels empirical conditions to agree. It declares, in
the name of these ideas, certain actions to be necessary which
nevertheless have not taken place and which perhaps never will take
place; and yet presupposes that it possesses the faculty of
causality in relation to these actions. For, in the absence of this
supposition, it could not expect its ideas to produce certain
effects in the world of experience.

Now, let us stop here and admit it to be at least possible that
reason does stand in a really causal relation to phenomena. In this
case it must--pure reason as it is--exhibit an empirical character.
For every cause supposes a rule, according to which certain
phenomena follow as effects from the cause, and every rule requires
uniformity in these effects; and this is the proper ground of the
conception of a cause--as a faculty or power. Now this conception
(of a cause) may be termed the empirical character of reason; and this
character is a permanent one, while the effects produced appear, in
conformity with the various conditions which accompany and partly
limit them, in various forms.

Thus the volition of every man has an empirical character, which
is nothing more than the causality of his reason, in so far as its
effects in the phenomenal world manifest the presence of a rule,
according to which we are enabled to examine, in their several kinds
and degrees, the actions of this causality and the rational grounds
for these actions, and in this way to decide upon the subjective
principles of the volition. Now we learn what this empirical character
is only from phenomenal effects, and from the rule of these which is
presented by experience; and for this reason all the actions of man
in the world of phenomena are determined by his empirical character,
and the co-operative causes of nature. If, then, we could
investigate all the phenomena of human volition to their lowest
foundation in the mind, there would be no action which we could not
anticipate with certainty, and recognize to be absolutely necessary
from its preceding conditions. So far as relates to this empirical
character, therefore, there can be no freedom; and it is only in the
light of this character that we can consider the human will, when we
confine ourselves to simple observation and, as is the case in
anthropology, institute a physiological investigation of the motive
causes of human actions.

But when we consider the same actions in relation to reason--not for
the purpose of explaining their origin, that is, in relation to
speculative reason, but to practical reason, as the producing cause
of these actions--we shall discover a rule and an order very different
from those of nature and experience. For the declaration of this
mental faculty may be that what has and could not but take place in
the course of nature, ought not to have taken place. Sometimes, too,
we discover, or believe that we discover, that the ideas of reason
did actually stand in a causal relation to certain actions of man;
and that these actions have taken place because they were determined,
not by empirical causes, but by the act of the will upon grounds of
reason.

Now, granting that reason stands in a causal relation to
phenomena; can an action of reason be called free, when we know
that, sensuously, in its empirical character, it is completely
determined and absolutely necessary? But this empirical character is
itself determined by the intelligible character. The latter we
cannot cognize; we can only indicate it by means of phenomena, which
enable us to have an immediate cognition only of the empirical
character.* An action, then, in so far as it is to be ascribed to an
intelligible cause, does not result from it in accordance with
empirical laws. That is to say, not the conditions of pure reason,
but only their effects in the internal sense, precede the act. Pure
reason, as a purely intelligible faculty, is not subject to the
conditions of time. The causality of reason in its intelligible
character does not begin to be; it does not make its appearance at
a certain time, for the purpose of producing an effect. If this were
not the case, the causality of reason would be subservient to the
natural law of phenomena, which determines them according to time,
and as a series of causes and effects in time; it would consequently
cease to be freedom and become a part of nature. We are therefore
justified in saying: "If reason stands in a causal relation to
phenomena, it is a faculty which originates the sensuous condition
of an empirical series of effects." For the condition, which resides
in the reason, is non-sensuous, and therefore cannot be originated,
or begin to be. And thus we find--what we could not discover in any
empirical series--a condition of a successive series of events
itself empirically unconditioned. For, in the present case, the
condition stands out of and beyond the series of phenomena--it is
intelligible, and it consequently cannot be subjected to any
sensuous condition, or to any time-determination by a preceding cause.

[*Footnote: The real morality of actions--their merit or demerit, and
even that of our own conduct, is completely unknown to us. Our estimates
can relate only to their empirical character. How much is the result
of the action of free will, how much is to be ascribed to nature and
to blameless error, or to a happy constitution of temperament (merito
fortunae), no one can discover, nor, for this reason, determine with
perfect justice.]

But, in another respect, the same cause belongs also to the series
of phenomena. Man is himself a phenomenon. His will has an empirical
character, which is the empirical cause of all his actions. There is
no condition--determining man and his volition in conformity with this
character--which does not itself form part of the series of effects
in nature, and is subject to their law--the law according to which
an empirically undetermined cause of an event in time cannot exist.
For this reason no given action can have an absolute and spontaneous
origination, all actions being phenomena, and belonging to the world
of experience. But it cannot be said of reason, that the state in
which it determines the will is always preceded by some other state
determining it. For reason is not a phenomenon, and therefore not
subject to sensuous conditions; and, consequently, even in relation
to its causality, the sequence or conditions of time do not influence
reason, nor can the dynamical law of nature, which determines the
sequence of time according to certain rules, be applied to it.

Reason is consequently the permanent condition of all actions of the
human will. Each of these is determined in the empirical character
of the man, even before it has taken place. The intelligible
character, of which the former is but the sensuous schema, knows no
before or after; and every action, irrespective of the time-relation
in which it stands with other phenomena, is the immediate effect of
the intelligible character of pure reason, which, consequently, enjoys
freedom of action, and is not dynamically determined either by
internal or external preceding conditions. This freedom must not be
described, in a merely negative manner, as independence of empirical
conditions, for in this case the faculty of reason would cease to be
a cause of phenomena; but it must be regarded, positively, as a
faculty which can spontaneously originate a series of events. At the
same time, it must not be supposed that any beginning can take place
in reason; on the contrary, reason, as the unconditioned condition
of all action of the will, admits of no time-conditions, although
its effect does really begin in a series of phenomena--a beginning
which is not, however, absolutely primal.

I shall illustrate this regulative principle of reason by an
example, from its employment in the world of experience; proved it
cannot be by any amount of experience, or by any number of facts,
for such arguments cannot establish the truth of transcendental
propositions. Let us take a voluntary action--for example, a
falsehood--by means of which a man has introduced a certain degree
of confusion into the social life of humanity, which is judged
according to the motives from which it originated, and the blame of
which and of the evil consequences arising from it, is imputed to
the offender. We at first proceed to examine the empirical character
of the offence, and for this purpose we endeavour to penetrate to
the sources of that character, such as a defective education, bad
company, a shameless and wicked disposition, frivolity, and want of
reflection--not forgetting also the occasioning causes which prevailed
at the moment of the transgression. In this the procedure is exactly
the same as that pursued in the investigation of the series of
causes which determine a given physical effect. Now, although we
believe the action to have been determined by all these circumstances,
we do not the less blame the offender. We do not blame him for his
unhappy disposition, nor for the circumstances which influenced him,
nay, not even for his former course of life; for we presuppose that
all these considerations may be set aside, that the series of
preceding conditions may be regarded as having never existed, and that
the action may be considered as completely unconditioned in relation
to any state preceding, just as if the agent commenced with it an
entirely new series of effects. Our blame of the offender is
grounded upon a law of reason, which requires us to regard this
faculty as a cause, which could have and ought to have otherwise
determined the behaviour of the culprit, independently of all
empirical conditions. This causality of reason we do not regard as
a co-operating agency, but as complete in itself. It matters not whether
the sensuous impulses favoured or opposed the action of this
causality, the offence is estimated according to its intelligible
character--the offender is decidedly worthy of blame, the moment he
utters a falsehood. It follows that we regard reason, in spite of
the empirical conditions of the act, as completely free, and
therefore, therefore, as in the present case, culpable.

The above judgement is complete evidence that we are accustomed to
think that reason is not affected by sensuous conditions, that in it
no change takes place--although its phenomena, in other words, the
mode in which it appears in its effects, are subject to change--that
in it no preceding state determines the following, and,
consequently, that it does not form a member of the series of sensuous
conditions which necessitate phenomena according to natural laws.
Reason is present and the same in all human actions and at all
times; but it does not itself exist in time, and therefore does not
enter upon any state in which it did not formerly exist. It is,
relatively to new states or conditions, determining, but not
determinable. Hence we cannot ask: "Why did not reason determine
itself in a different manner?" The question ought to be thus stated:
"Why did not reason employ its power of causality to determine certain
phenomena in a different manner?" But this is a question which admits
of no answer. For a different intelligible character would have
exhibited a different empirical character; and, when we say that, in
spite of the course which his whole former life has taken, the
offender could have refrained from uttering the falsehood, this
means merely that the act was subject to the power and authority-
permissive or prohibitive--of reason. Now, reason is not subject in
its causality to any conditions of phenomena or of time; and a
difference in time may produce a difference in the relation of
phenomena to each other--for these are not things and therefore not
causes in themselves--but it cannot produce any difference in the
relation in which the action stands to the faculty of reason.

Thus, then, in our investigation into free actions and the causal
power which produced them, we arrive at an intelligible cause,
beyond which, however, we cannot go; although we can recognize that
it is free, that is, independent of all sensuous conditions, and that,
in this way, it may be the sensuously unconditioned condition of
phenomena. But for what reason the intelligible character generates
such and such phenomena and exhibits such and such an empirical
character under certain circumstances, it is beyond the power of our
reason to decide. The question is as much above the power and the
sphere of reason as the following would be: "Why does the
transcendental object of our external sensuous intuition allow of no
other form than that of intuition in space?" But the problem, which
we were called upon to solve, does not require us to entertain any
such questions. The problem was merely this--whether freedom and natural
necessity can exist without opposition in the same action. To this
question we have given a sufficient answer; for we have shown that,
as the former stands in a relation to a different kind of condition
from those of the latter, the law of the one does not affect the law
of the other and that, consequently, both can exist together in
independence of and without interference with each other.

The reader must be careful to remark that my intention in the
above remarks has not been to prove the actual existence of freedom,
as a faculty in which resides the cause of certain sensuous phenomena.
For, not to mention that such an argument would not have a
transcendental character, nor have been limited to the discussion of
pure conceptions--all attempts at inferring from experience what
cannot be cogitated in accordance with its laws, must ever be
unsuccessful. Nay, more, I have not even aimed at demonstrating the
possibility of freedom; for this too would have been a vain endeavour,
inasmuch as it is beyond the power of the mind to cognize the
possibility of a reality or of a causal power by the aid of mere a
priori conceptions. Freedom has been considered in the foregoing
remarks only as a transcendental idea, by means of which reason aims
at originating a series of conditions in the world of phenomena with
the help of that which is sensuously unconditioned, involving
itself, however, in an antinomy with the laws which itself
prescribes for the conduct of the understanding. That this antinomy
is based upon a mere illusion, and that nature and freedom are at least
not opposed--this was the only thing in our power to prove, and the
question which it was our task to solve.

IV. Solution of the Cosmological Idea of the Totality of the Dependence of Phenomenal Existences.

In the preceding remarks, we considered the changes in the world
of sense as constituting a dynamical series, in which each member is
subordinated to another--as its cause. Our present purpose is to avail
ourselves of this series of states or conditions as a guide to an
existence which may be the highest condition of all changeable
phenomena, that is, to a necessary being. Our endeavour to reach,
not the unconditioned causality, but the unconditioned existence, of
substance. The series before us is therefore a series of
conceptions, and not of intuitions (in which the one intuition is
the condition of the other).

But it is evident that, as all phenomena are subject to change and
conditioned in their existence, the series of dependent existences
cannot embrace an unconditioned member, the existence of which would
be absolutely necessary. It follows that, if phenomena were things
in themselves, and--as an immediate consequence from this supposition-
condition and conditioned belonged to the same series of phenomena,
the existence of a necessary being, as the condition of the
existence of sensuous phenomena, would be perfectly impossible.

An important distinction, however, exists between the dynamical
and the mathematical regress. The latter is engaged solely with the
combination of parts into a whole, or with the division of a whole
into its parts; and therefore are the conditions of its series parts
of the series, and to be consequently regarded as homogeneous, and
for this reason, as consisting, without exception, of phenomena. If
the former regress, on the contrary, the aim of which is not to
establish the possibility of an unconditioned whole consisting of
given parts, or of an unconditioned part of a given whole, but to
demonstrate the possibility of the deduction of a certain state from
its cause, or of the contingent existence of substance from that which
exists necessarily, it is not requisite that the condition should form
part of an empirical series along with the conditioned.

In the case of the apparent antinomy with which we are at present
dealing, there exists a way of escape from the difficulty; for it is
not impossible that both of the contradictory statements may be true
in different relations. All sensuous phenomena may be contingent,
and consequently possess only an empirically conditioned existence,
and yet there may also exist a non-empirical condition of the whole
series, or, in other words, a necessary being. For this necessary
being, as an intelligible condition, would not form a member--not even
the highest member--of the series; the whole world of sense would be
left in its empirically determined existence uninterfered with and
uninfluenced. This would also form a ground of distinction between
the modes of solution employed for the third and fourth antinomies.
For, while in the consideration of freedom in the former antinomy,
the thing itself--the cause (substantia phaenomenon)--was regarded
as belonging to the series of conditions, and only its causality to
the intelligible world--we are obliged in the present case to cogitate
this necessary being as purely intelligible and as existing entirely
apart from the world of sense (as an ens extramundanum); for otherwise
it would be subject to the phenomenal law of contingency and
dependence.

In relation to the present problem, therefore, the regulative
principle of reason is that everything in the sensuous world possesses
an empirically conditioned existence--that no property of the sensuous
world possesses unconditioned necessity--that we are bound to
expect, and, so far as is possible, to seek for the empirical
condition of every member in the series of conditions--and that
there is no sufficient reason to justify us in deducing any
existence from a condition which lies out of and beyond the
empirical series, or in regarding any existence as independent and
self-subsistent; although this should not prevent us from
recognizing the possibility of the whole series being based upon a
being which is intelligible, and for this reason free from all
empirical conditions.

But it has been far from my intention, in these remarks, to prove
the existence of this unconditioned and necessary being, or even to
evidence the possibility of a purely intelligible condition of the
existence or all sensuous phenomena. As bounds were set to reason,
to prevent it from leaving the guiding thread of empirical
conditions and losing itself in transcendent theories which are
incapable of concrete presentation; so it was my purpose, on the other
band, to set bounds to the law of the purely empirical
understanding, and to protest against any attempts on its part at
deciding on the possibility of things, or declaring the existence of
the intelligible to be impossible, merely on the ground that it is
not available for the explanation and exposition of phenomena. It has
been shown, at the same time, that the contingency of all the phenomena
of nature and their empirical conditions is quite consistent with
the arbitrary hypothesis of a necessary, although purely
intelligible condition, that no real contradiction exists between them
and that, consequently, both may be true. The existence of such an
absolutely necessary being may be impossible; but this can never be
demonstrated from the universal contingency and dependence of sensuous
phenomena, nor from the principle which forbids us to discontinue
the series at some member of it, or to seek for its cause in some
sphere of existence beyond the world of nature. Reason goes its way
in the empirical world, and follows, too, its peculiar path in the
sphere of the transcendental.

The sensuous world contains nothing but phenomena, which are mere
representations, and always sensuously conditioned; things in
themselves are not, and cannot be, objects to us. It is not to be
wondered at, therefore, that we are not justified in leaping from some
member of an empirical series beyond the world of sense, as if
empirical representations were things in themselves, existing apart
from their transcendental ground in the human mind, and the cause of
whose existence may be sought out of the empirical series. This
would certainly be the case with contingent things; but it cannot be
with mere representations of things, the contingency of which is
itself merely a phenomenon and can relate to no other regress than
that which determines phenomena, that is, the empirical. But to
cogitate an intelligible ground of phenomena, as free, moreover,
from the contingency of the latter, conflicts neither with the
unlimited nature of the empirical regress, nor with the complete
contingency of phenomena. And the demonstration of this was the only
thing necessary for the solution of this apparent antinomy. For if
the condition of every conditioned--as regards its existence--is sensuous,
and for this reason a part of the same series, it must be itself
conditioned, as was shown in the antithesis of the fourth antinomy.
The embarrassments into which a reason, which postulates the
unconditioned, necessarily falls, must, therefore, continue to
exist; or the unconditioned must be placed in the sphere of the
intelligible. In this way, its necessity does not require, nor does
it even permit, the presence of an empirical condition: and it is,
consequently, unconditionally necessary.

The empirical employment of reason is not affected by the assumption
of a purely intelligible being; it continues its operations on the
principle of the contingency of all phenomena, proceeding from
empirical conditions to still higher and higher conditions, themselves
empirical. Just as little does this regulative principle exclude the
assumption of an intelligible cause, when the question regards
merely the pure employment of reason--in relation to ends or aims.
For, in this case, an intelligible cause signifies merely the
transcendental and to us unknown ground of the possibility of sensuous
phenomena, and its existence, necessary and independent of all
sensuous conditions, is not inconsistent with the contingency of
phenomena, or with the unlimited possibility of regress which exists
in the series of empirical conditions.

Concluding Remarks on the Antinomy of Pure Reason.

So long as the object of our rational conceptions is the totality of
conditions in the world of phenomena, and the satisfaction, from
this source, of the requirements of reason, so long are our ideas
transcendental and cosmological. But when we set the unconditioned-
which is the aim of all our inquiries--in a sphere which lies out of
the world of sense and possible experience, our ideas become
transcendent. They are then not merely serviceable towards the
completion of the exercise of reason (which remains an idea, never
executed, but always to be pursued); they detach themselves completely
from experience and construct for themselves objects, the material
of which has not been presented by experience, and the objective
reality of which is not based upon the completion of the empirical
series, but upon pure a priori conceptions. The intelligible object
of these transcendent ideas may be conceded, as a transcendental
object. But we cannot cogitate it as a thing determinable by certain
distinct predicates relating to its internal nature, for it has no
connection with empirical conceptions; nor are we justified in
affirming the existence of any such object. It is, consequently, a
mere product of the mind alone. Of all the cosmological ideas,
however, it is that occasioning the fourth antinomy which compels us
to venture upon this step. For the existence of phenomena, always
conditioned and never self-subsistent, requires us to look for an
object different from phenomena--an intelligible object, with which
all contingency must cease. But, as we have allowed ourselves to
assume the existence of a self-subsistent reality out of the field
of experience, and are therefore obliged to regard phenomena as merely
a contingent mode of representing intelligible objects employed by
beings which are themselves intelligences--no other course remains
for us than to follow analogy and employ the same mode in forming
some conception of intelligible things, of which we have not the least
knowledge, which nature taught us to use in the formation of empirical
conceptions. Experience made us acquainted with the contingent. But
we are at present engaged in the discussion of things which are not
objects of experience; and must, therefore, deduce our knowledge of
them from that which is necessary absolutely and in itself, that is,
from pure conceptions. Hence the first step which we take out of the
world of sense obliges us to begin our system of new cognition with
the investigation of a necessary being, and to deduce from our
conceptions of it all our conceptions of intelligible things. This
we propose to attempt in the following chapter.

CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason.

SECTION I. Of the Ideal in General.

We have seen that pure conceptions do not present objects to the
mind, except under sensuous conditions; because the conditions of
objective reality do not exist in these conceptions, which contain,
in fact, nothing but the mere form of thought. They may, however, when
applied to phenomena, be presented in concreto; for it is phenomena
that present to them the materials for the formation of empirical
conceptions, which are nothing more than concrete forms of the
conceptions of the understanding. But ideas are still further
removed from objective reality than categories; for no phenomenon
can ever present them to the human mind in concreto. They contain a
certain perfection, attainable by no possible empirical cognition;
and they give to reason a systematic unity, to which the unity of
experience attempts to approximate, but can never completely attain.

But still further removed than the idea from objective reality is
the Ideal, by which term I understand the idea, not in concreto, but
in individuo--as an individual thing, determinable or determined by
the idea alone. The idea of humanity in its complete perfection
supposes not only the advancement of all the powers and faculties,
which constitute our conception of human nature, to a complete
attainment of their final aims, but also everything which is requisite
for the complete determination of the idea; for of all contradictory
predicates, only one can conform with the idea of the perfect man.
What I have termed an ideal was in Plato's philosophy an idea of the
divine mind--an individual object present to its pure intuition, the
most perfect of every kind of possible beings, and the archetype of
all phenomenal existences.

Without rising to these speculative heights, we are bound to confess
that human reason contains not only ideas, but ideals, which
possess, not, like those of Plato, creative, but certainly practical
power--as regulative principles, and form the basis of the
perfectibility of certain actions. Moral conceptions are not perfectly
pure conceptions of reason, because an empirical element--of
pleasure or pain--lies at the foundation of them. In relation,
however, to the principle, whereby reason sets bounds to a freedom
which is in itself without law, and consequently when we attend merely
to their form, they may be considered as pure conceptions of reason.
Virtue and wisdom in their perfect purity are ideas. But the wise
man of the Stoics is an ideal, that is to say, a human being
existing only in thought and in complete conformity with the idea of
wisdom. As the idea provides a rule, so the ideal serves as an
archetype for the perfect and complete determination of the copy. Thus
the conduct of this wise and divine man serves us as a standard of
action, with which we may compare and judge ourselves, which may
help us to reform ourselves, although the perfection it demands can
never be attained by us. Although we cannot concede objective
reality to these ideals, they are not to be considered as chimeras;
on the contrary, they provide reason with a standard, which enables
it to estimate, by comparison, the degree of incompleteness in the
objects presented to it. But to aim at realizing the ideal in an example
in the world of experience--to describe, for instance, the character
of the perfectly wise man in a romance--is impracticable. Nay more,
there is something absurd in the attempt; and the result must be little
edifying, as the natural limitations, which are continually breaking
in upon the perfection and completeness of the idea, destroy the
illusion in the story and throw an air of suspicion even on what is
good in the idea, which hence appears fictitious and unreal.

Such is the constitution of the ideal of reason, which is always
based upon determinate conceptions, and serves as a rule and a model
for limitation or of criticism. Very different is the nature of the
ideals of the imagination. Of these it is impossible to present an
intelligible conception; they are a kind of monogram, drawn
according to no determinate rule, and forming rather a vague
picture--the production of many diverse experiences--than a
determinate image. Such are the ideals which painters and
physiognomists profess to have in their minds, and which can serve
neither as a model for production nor as a standard for
appreciation. They may be termed, though improperly, sensuous
ideals, as they are declared to be models of certain possible
empirical intuitions. They cannot, however, furnish rules or standards
for explanation or examination.

In its ideals, reason aims at complete and perfect determination
according to a priori rules; and hence it cogitates an object, which
must be completely determinable in conformity with principles,
although all empirical conditions are absent, and the conception of
the object is on this account transcendent.

SECTION II. Of the Transcendental Ideal (Prototypon Trancendentale).

Every conception is, in relation to that which is not contained in
it, undetermined and subject to the principle of determinability. This
principle is that, of every two contradictorily opposed predicates,
only one can belong to a conception. It is a purely logical principle,
itself based upon the principle of contradiction; inasmuch as it makes
complete abstraction of the content and attends merely to the
logical form of the cognition.

But again, everything, as regards its possibility, is also subject
to the principle of complete determination, according to which one
of all the possible contradictory predicates of things must belong
to it. This principle is not based merely upon that of
contradiction; for, in addition to the relation between two
contradictory predicates, it regards everything as standing in a
relation to the sum of possibilities, as the sum total of all
predicates of things, and, while presupposing this sum as an a
priori condition, presents to the mind everything as receiving the
possibility of its individual existence from the relation it bears
to, and the share it possesses in, the aforesaid sum of possibilities.*
The principle of complete determination relates the content and not
to the logical form. It is the principle of the synthesis of all the
predicates which are required to constitute the complete conception
of a thing, and not a mere principle analytical representation, which
enounces that one of two contradictory predicates must belong to a
conception. It contains, moreover, a transcendental presupposition--
that, namely, of the material for all possibility, which must
contain a priori the data for this or that particular possibility.

[*Footnote: Thus this principle declares everything to possess a
relation to a common correlate--the sum-total of possibility, which, if
discovered to exist in the idea of one individual thing, would
establish the affinity of all possible things, from the identity of the
ground of their complete determination. The determinability of every
conception is subordinate to the universality (Allgemeinheit,
universalitas) of the principle of excluded middle; the determination
of a thing to the totality (Allheit, universitas) of all possible
predicates.]

The proposition, everything which exists is completely determined,
means not only that one of every pair of given contradictory
attributes, but that one of all possible attributes, is always
predicable of the thing; in it the predicates are not merely
compared logically with each other, but the thing itself is
transcendentally compared with the sum-total of all possible
predicates. The proposition is equivalent to saying: "To attain to
a complete knowledge of a thing, it is necessary to possess a
knowledge of everything that is possible, and to determine it
thereby in a positive or negative manner." The conception of
complete determination is consequently a conception which cannot be
presented in its totality in concreto, and is therefore based upon
an idea, which has its seat in the reason--the faculty which
prescribes to the understanding the laws of its harmonious and perfect
exercise.

Now, although this idea of the sum-total of all possibility, in so
far as it forms the condition of the complete determination of
everything, is itself undetermined in relation to the predicates which
may constitute this sum-total, and we cogitate in it merely the
sum-total of all possible predicates--we nevertheless find, upon
closer examination, that this idea, as a primitive conception of the
mind, excludes a large number of predicates--those deduced and those
irreconcilable with others, and that it is evolved as a conception
completely determined a priori. Thus it becomes the conception of an
individual object, which is completely determined by and through the
mere idea, and must consequently be termed an ideal of pure reason.

When we consider all possible predicates, not merely logically,
but transcendentally, that is to say, with reference to the content
which may be cogitated as existing in them a priori, we shall find
that some indicate a being, others merely a non-being. The logical
negation expressed in the word not does not properly belong to a
conception, but only to the relation of one conception to another in
a judgement, and is consequently quite insufficient to present to the
mind the content of a conception. The expression not mortal does not
indicate that a non-being is cogitated in the object; it does not
concern the content at all. A transcendental negation, on the
contrary, indicates non-being in itself, and is opposed to
transcendental affirmation, the conception of which of itself
expresses a being. Hence this affirmation indicates a reality, because
in and through it objects are considered to be something--to be
things; while the opposite negation, on the other band, indicates a
mere want, or privation, or absence, and, where such negations alone
are attached to a representation, the non-existence of anything
corresponding to the representation.

Now a negation cannot be cogitated as determined, without cogitating
at the same time the opposite affirmation. The man born blind has
not the least notion of darkness, because he has none of light; the
vagabond knows nothing of poverty, because he has never known what
it is to be in comfort;* the ignorant man has no conception of his
ignorance, because he has no conception of knowledge. All
conceptions of negatives are accordingly derived or deduced
conceptions; and realities contain the data, and, so to speak, the
material or transcendental content of the possibility and complete
determination of all things.

[*Footnote: The investigations and calculations of astronomers have
taught us much that is wonderful; but the most important lesson we
have received from them is the discovery of the abyss of our ignorance
in relation to the universe--an ignorance the magnitude of which reason,
without the information thus derived, could never have conceived. This
discovery of our deficiencies must produce a great change in the
determination of the aims of human reason.]

If, therefore, a transcendental substratum lies at the foundation of
the complete determination of things--a substratum which is to form
the fund from which all possible predicates of things are to be
supplied, this substratum cannot be anything else than the idea of
a sum-total of reality (omnitudo realitatis). In this view, negations
are nothing but limitations--a term which could not, with propriety,
be applied to them, if the unlimited (the all) did not form the true
basis of our conception.

This conception of a sum-total of reality is the conception of a
thing in itself, regarded as completely determined; and the conception
of an ens realissimum is the conception of an individual being,
inasmuch as it is determined by that predicate of all possible
contradictory predicates, which indicates and belongs to being. It
is, therefore, a transcendental ideal which forms the basis of the
complete determination of everything that exists, and is the highest
material condition of its possibility--a condition on which must
rest the cogitation of all objects with respect to their content. Nay,
more, this ideal is the only proper ideal of which the human mind is
capable; because in this case alone a general conception of a thing
is completely determined by and through itself, and cognized as the
representation of an individuum.

The logical determination of a conception is based upon a
disjunctive syllogism, the major of which contains the logical
division of the extent of a general conception, the minor limits
this extent to a certain part, while the conclusion determines the
conception by this part. The general conception of a reality cannot
be divided a priori, because, without the aid of experience, we cannot
know any determinate kinds of reality, standing under the former as
the genus. The transcendental principle of the complete
determination of all things is therefore merely the representation
of the sum-total of all reality; it is not a conception which is the
genus of all predicates under itself, but one which comprehends them
all within itself. The complete determination of a thing is
consequently based upon the limitation of this total of reality, so
much being predicated of the thing, while all that remains over is
excluded--a procedure which is in exact agreement with that of the
disjunctive syllogism and the determination of the objects in the
conclusion by one of the members of the division. It follows that
reason, in laying the transcendental ideal at the foundation of its
determination of all possible things, takes a course in exact
analogy with that which it pursues in disjunctive syllogisms--a
proposition which formed the basis of the systematic division of all
transcendental ideas, according to which they are produced in complete
parallelism with the three modes of syllogistic reasoning employed
by the human mind.

It is self-evident that reason, in cogitating the necessary complete
determination of things, does not presuppose the existence of a
being corresponding to its ideal, but merely the idea of the ideal-
for the purpose of deducing from the unconditional totality of
complete determination, The ideal is therefore the prototype of all
things, which, as defective copies (ectypa), receive from it the
material of their possibility, and approximate to it more or less,
though it is impossible that they can ever attain to its perfection.

The possibility of things must therefore be regarded as derived-
except that of the thing which contains in itself all reality, which
must be considered to be primitive and original. For all negations-
and they are the only predicates by means of which all other things
can be distinguished from the ens realissimum--are mere limitations
of a greater and a higher--nay, the highest reality; and they
consequently presuppose this reality, and are, as regards their
content, derived from it. The manifold nature of things is only an
infinitely various mode of limiting the conception of the highest
reality, which is their common substratum; just as all figures are
possible only as different modes of limiting infinite space. The
object of the ideal of reason--an object existing only in reason
itself--is also termed the primal being (ens originarium); as having
no existence superior to him, the supreme being (ens summum); and as
being the condition of all other beings, which rank under it, the
being of all beings (ens entium). But none of these terms indicate
the objective relation of an actually existing object to other things,
but merely that of an idea to conceptions; and all our investigations
into this subject still leave us in perfect uncertainty with regard
to the existence of this being.

A primal being cannot be said to consist of many other beings with
an existence which is derivative, for the latter presuppose the
former, and therefore cannot be constitutive parts of it. It follows
that the ideal of the primal being must be cogitated as simple.

The deduction of the possibility of all other things from this
primal being cannot, strictly speaking, be considered as a limitation,
or as a kind of division of its reality; for this would be regarding
the primal being as a mere aggregate--which has been shown to be
impossible, although it was so represented in our first rough
sketch. The highest reality must be regarded rather as the ground than
as the sum-total of the possibility of all things, and the manifold
nature of things be based, not upon the limitation of the primal being
itself, but upon the complete series of effects which flow from it.
And thus all our powers of sense, as well as all phenomenal reality,
phenomenal reality, may be with propriety regarded as belonging to
this series of effects, while they could not have formed parts of
the idea, considered as an aggregate. Pursuing this track, and
hypostatizing this idea, we shall find ourselves authorized to
determine our notion of the Supreme Being by means of the mere
conception of a highest reality, as one, simple, all-sufficient,
eternal, and so on--in one word, to determine it in its
unconditioned completeness by the aid of every possible predicate.
The conception of such a being is the conception of God in its
transcendental sense, and thus the ideal of pure reason is the
object-matter of a transcendental theology.

But, by such an employment of the transcendental idea, we should
be over stepping the limits of its validity and purpose. For reason
placed it, as the conception of all reality, at the basis of the
complete determination of things, without requiring that this
conception be regarded as the conception of an objective existence.
Such an existence would be purely fictitious, and the hypostatizing
of the content of the idea into an ideal, as an individual being, is
a step perfectly unauthorized. Nay, more, we are not even called upon
to assume the possibility of such an hypothesis, as none of the
deductions drawn from such an ideal would affect the complete
determination of things in general--for the sake of which alone is
the idea necessary.

It is not sufficient to circumscribe the procedure and the dialectic
of reason; we must also endeavour to discover the sources of this
dialectic, that we may have it in our power to give a rational
explanation of this illusion, as a phenomenon of the human mind. For
the ideal, of which we are at present speaking, is based, not upon
an arbitrary, but upon a natural, idea. The question hence arises:
How happens it that reason regards the possibility of all things as
deduced from a single possibility, that, to wit, of the highest
reality, and presupposes this as existing in an individual and
primal being?

The answer is ready; it is at once presented by the procedure of
transcendental analytic. The possibility of sensuous objects is a
relation of these objects to thought, in which something (the
empirical form) may be cogitated a priori; while that which
constitutes the matter--the reality of the phenomenon (that element
which corresponds to sensation)--must be given from without, as
otherwise it could not even be cogitated by, nor could its possibility
be presentable to the mind. Now, a sensuous object is completely
determined, when it has been compared with all phenomenal
predicates, and represented by means of these either positively or
negatively. But, as that which constitutes the thing itself--the
real in a phenomenon, must be given, and that, in which the real of
all phenomena is given, is experience, one, sole, and all-embracing-
the material of the possibility of all sensuous objects must be
presupposed as given in a whole, and it is upon the limitation of this
whole that the possibility of all empirical objects, their distinction
from each other and their complete determination, are based. Now, no
other objects are presented to us besides sensuous objects, and
these can be given only in connection with a possible experience; it
follows that a thing is not an object to us, unless it presupposes
the whole or sum-total of empirical reality as the condition of its
possibility. Now, a natural illusion leads us to consider this
principle, which is valid only of sensuous objects, as valid with
regard to things in general. And thus we are induced to hold the
empirical principle of our conceptions of the possibility of things,
as phenomena, by leaving out this limitative condition, to be a
transcendental principle of the possibility of things in general.

We proceed afterwards to hypostatize this idea of the sum-total of
all reality, by changing the distributive unity of the empirical
exercise of the understanding into the collective unity of an
empirical whole--a dialectical illusion, and by cogitating this
whole or sum of experience as an individual thing, containing in
itself all empirical reality. This individual thing or being is
then, by means of the above-mentioned transcendental subreption,
substituted for our notion of a thing which stands at the head of
the possibility of all things, the real conditions of whose complete
determination it presents.*

[*Footnote: This ideal of the ens realissimum--although merely a mental
representation--is first objectivized, that is, has an objective
existence attributed to it, then hypostatized, and finally, by the
natural progress of reason to the completion of unity, personified,
as we shall show presently. For the regulative unity of experience
is not based upon phenomena themselves, but upon the connection of
the variety of phenomena by the understanding in a consciousness, and
thus the unity of the supreme reality and the complete determinability
of all things, seem to reside in a supreme understanding, and,
consequently, in a conscious intelligence.]

SECTION III. Of the Arguments employed by Speculative Reason in Proof of the Existence of a Supreme Being.

Notwithstanding the pressing necessity which reason feels, to form
some presupposition that shall serve the understanding as a proper
basis for the complete determination of its conceptions, the
idealistic and factitious nature of such a presupposition is too
evident to allow reason for a moment to persuade itself into a
belief of the objective existence of a mere creation of its own
thought. But there are other considerations which compel reason to
seek out some resting place in the regress from the conditioned to
the unconditioned, which is not given as an actual existence from the
mere conception of it, although it alone can give completeness to the
series of conditions. And this is the natural course of every human
reason, even of the most uneducated, although the path at first
entered it does not always continue to follow. It does not begin
from conceptions, but from common experience, and requires a basis
in actual existence. But this basis is insecure, unless it rests
upon the immovable rock of the absolutely necessary. And this
foundation is itself unworthy of trust, if it leave under and above
it empty space, if it do not fill all, and leave no room for a why
or a wherefore, if it be not, in one word, infinite in its reality.

If we admit the existence of some one thing, whatever it may be,
we must also admit that there is something which exists necessarily.
For what is contingent exists only under the condition of some other
thing, which is its cause; and from this we must go on to conclude
the existence of a cause which is not contingent, and which consequently
exists necessarily and unconditionally. Such is the argument by
which reason justifies its advances towards a primal being.

Now reason looks round for the conception of a being that may be
admitted, without inconsistency, to be worthy of the attribute of
absolute necessity, not for the purpose of inferring a priori, from
the conception of such a being, its objective existence (for if reason
allowed itself to take this course, it would not require a basis in
given and actual existence, but merely the support of pure
conceptions), but for the purpose of discovering, among all our
conceptions of possible things, that conception which possesses no
element inconsistent with the idea of absolute necessity. For that
there must be some absolutely necessary existence, it regards as a
truth already established. Now, if it can remove every existence
incapable of supporting the attribute of absolute necessity, excepting
one--this must be the absolutely necessary being, whether its
necessity is comprehensible by us, that is, deducible from the
conception of it alone, or not.

Now that, the conception of which contains a therefore to every
wherefore, which is not defective in any respect whatever, which is
all-sufficient as a condition, seems to be the being of which we can
justly predicate absolute necessity--for this reason, that, possessing
the conditions of all that is possible, it does not and cannot
itself require any condition. And thus it satisfies, in one respect
at least, the requirements of the conception of absolute necessity.
In this view, it is superior to all other conceptions, which, as
deficient and incomplete, do not possess the characteristic of
independence of all higher conditions. It is true that we cannot infer
from this that what does not contain in itself the supreme and
complete condition--the condition of all other things--must possess
only a conditioned existence; but as little can we assert the
contrary, for this supposed being does not possess the only
characteristic which can enable reason to cognize by means of an a
priori conception the unconditioned and necessary nature of its
existence.

The conception of an ens realissimum is that which best agrees
with the conception of an unconditioned and necessary being. The
former conception does not satisfy all the requirements of the latter;
but we have no choice, we are obliged to adhere to it, for we find
that we cannot do without the existence of a necessary being; and even
although we admit it, we find it out of our power to discover in the
whole sphere of possibility any being that can advance well-grounded
claims to such a distinction.

The following is, therefore, the natural course of human reason.
It begins by persuading itself of the existence of some necessary
being. In this being it recognizes the characteristics of
unconditioned existence. It then seeks the conception of that which
is independent of all conditions, and finds it in that which is itself
the sufficient condition of all other things--in other words, in
that which contains all reality. But the unlimited all is an
absolute unity, and is conceived by the mind as a being one and
supreme; and thus reason concludes that the Supreme Being, as the
primal basis of all things, possesses an existence which is absolutely
necessary.

This conception must be regarded as in some degree satisfactory,
if we admit the existence of a necessary being, and consider that
there exists a necessity for a definite and final answer to these
questions. In such a case, we cannot make a better choice, or rather
we have no choice at all, but feel ourselves obliged to declare in
favour of the absolute unity of complete reality, as the highest
source of the possibility of things. But if there exists no motive
for coming to a definite conclusion, and we may leave the question
unanswered till we have fully weighed both sides--in other words, when
we are merely called upon to decide how much we happen to know about
the question, and how much we merely flatter ourselves that we know-
the above conclusion does not appear to be so great advantage, but,
on the contrary, seems defective in the grounds upon which it is
supported.

For, admitting the truth of all that has been said, that, namely,
the inference from a given existence (my own, for example) to the
existence of an unconditioned and necessary being is valid and
unassailable; that, in the second place, we must consider a being
which contains all reality, and consequently all the conditions of
other things, to be absolutely unconditioned; and admitting too,
that we have thus discovered the conception of a thing to which may
be attributed, without inconsistency, absolute necessity--it does not
follow from all this that the conception of a limited being, in
which the supreme reality does not reside, is therefore incompatible
with the idea of absolute necessity. For, although I do not discover
the element of the unconditioned in the conception of such a being--an
element which is manifestly existent in the sum-total of all
conditions--I am not entitled to conclude that its existence is
therefore conditioned; just as I am not entitled to affirm, in a
hypothetical syllogism, that where a certain condition does not
exist (in the present, completeness, as far as pure conceptions are
concerned), the conditioned does not exist either. On the contrary,
we are free to consider all limited beings as likewise unconditionally
necessary, although we are unable to infer this from the general
conception which we have of them. Thus conducted, this argument is
incapable of giving us the least notion of the properties of a
necessary being, and must be in every respect without result.

This argument continues, however, to possess a weight and an
authority, which, in spite of its objective insufficiency, it has
never been divested of. For, granting that certain responsibilities
lie upon us, which, as based on the ideas of reason, deserve to be
respected and submitted to, although they are incapable of a real or
practical application to our nature, or, in other words, would be
responsibilities without motives, except upon the supposition of a
Supreme Being to give effect and influence to the practical laws: in
such a case we should be bound to obey our conceptions, which,
although objectively insufficient, do, according to the standard of
reason, preponderate over and are superior to any claims that may be
advanced from any other quarter. The equilibrium of doubt would in
this case be destroyed by a practical addition; indeed, Reason would
be compelled to condemn herself, if she refused to comply with the
demands of the judgement, no superior to which we know--however
defective her understanding of the grounds of these demands might be.

This argument, although in fact transcendental, inasmuch as it rests
upon the intrinsic insufficiency of the contingent, is so simple and
natural, that the commonest understanding can appreciate its value.
We see things around us change, arise, and pass away; they, or their
condition, must therefore have a cause. The same demand must again
be made of the cause itself--as a datum of experience. Now it is
natural that we should place the highest causality just where we place
supreme causality, in that being, which contains the conditions of
all possible effects, and the conception of which is so simple as that
of an all-embracing reality. This highest cause, then, we regard as
absolutely necessary, because we find it absolutely necessary to
rise to it, and do not discover any reason for proceeding beyond it.
Thus, among all nations, through the darkest polytheism glimmer some
faint sparks of monotheism, to which these idolaters have been led,
not from reflection and profound thought, but by the study and natural
progress of the common understanding.

There are only three modes of proving the existence of a Deity, on
the grounds of speculative reason.

All the paths conducting to this end begin either from determinate
experience and the peculiar constitution of the world of sense, and
rise, according to the laws of causality, from it to the highest cause
existing apart from the world--or from a purely indeterminate
experience, that is, some empirical existence--or abstraction is
made of all experience, and the existence of a supreme cause is
concluded from a priori conceptions alone. The first is the
physico-theological argument, the second the cosmological, the third
the ontological. More there are not, and more there cannot be.

I shall show it is as unsuccessful on the one path--the empirical-
as on the other--the transcendental, and that it stretches its wings
in vain, to soar beyond the world of sense by the mere might of
speculative thought. As regards the order in which we must discuss
those arguments, it will be exactly the reverse of that in which
reason, in the progress of its development, attains to them--the order
in which they are placed above. For it will be made manifest to the
reader that, although experience presents the occasion and the
starting-point, it is the transcendental idea of reason which guides
it in its pilgrimage and is the goal of all its struggles. I shall
therefore begin with an examination of the transcendental argument,
and afterwards inquire what additional strength has accrued to this
mode of proof from the addition of the empirical element.

SECTION IV. Of the Impossibility of an Ontological Proof of the Existence of God.

It is evident from what has been said that the conception of an
absolutely necessary being is a mere idea, the objective reality of
which is far from being established by the mere fact that it is a need
of reason. On the contrary, this idea serves merely to indicate a
certain unattainable perfection, and rather limits the operations
than, by the presentation of new objects, extends the sphere of the
understanding. But a strange anomaly meets us at the very threshold;
for the inference from a given existence in general to an absolutely
necessary existence seems to be correct and unavoidable, while the
conditions of the understanding refuse to aid us in forming any
conception of such a being.

Philosophers have always talked of an absolutely necessary being,
and have nevertheless declined to take the trouble of conceiving
whether--and how--a being of this nature is even cogitable, not to
mention that its existence is actually demonstrable. A verbal
definition of the conception is certainly easy enough: it is something
the non-existence of which is impossible. But does this definition
throw any light upon the conditions which render it impossible to
cogitate the non-existence of a thing--conditions which we wish to
ascertain, that we may discover whether we think anything in the
conception of such a being or not? For the mere fact that I throw
away, by means of the word unconditioned, all the conditions which
the understanding habitually requires in order to regard anything as
necessary, is very far from making clear whether by means of the
conception of the unconditionally necessary I think of something, or
really of nothing at all.

Nay, more, this chance-conception, now become so current, many
have endeavoured to explain by examples which seemed to render any
inquiries regarding its intelligibility quite needless. Every
geometrical proposition--a triangle has three angles--it was said,
is absolutely necessary; and thus people talked of an object which
lay out of the sphere of our understanding as if it were perfectly
plain what the conception of such a being meant.

All the examples adduced have been drawn, without exception, from
judgements, and not from things. But the unconditioned necessity of
a judgement does not form the absolute necessity of a thing. On the
contrary, the absolute necessity of a judgement is only a
conditioned necessity of a thing, or of the predicate in a
judgement. The proposition above-mentioned does not enounce that three
angles necessarily exist, but, upon condition that a triangle
exists, three angles must necessarily exist--in it. And thus this
logical necessity has been the source of the greatest delusions.
Having formed an a priori conception of a thing, the content of
which was made to embrace existence, we believed ourselves safe in
concluding that, because existence belongs necessarily to the object
of the conception (that is, under the condition of my positing this
thing as given), the existence of the thing is also posited
necessarily, and that it is therefore absolutely necessary--merely
because its existence has been cogitated in the conception.

If, in an identical judgement, I annihilate the predicate in
thought, and retain the subject, a contradiction is the result; and
hence I say, the former belongs necessarily to the latter. But if I
suppress both subject and predicate in thought, no contradiction
arises; for there is nothing at all, and therefore no means of forming
a contradiction. To suppose the existence of a triangle and not that
of its three angles, is self-contradictory; but to suppose the
non-existence of both triangle and angles is perfectly admissible.
And so is it with the conception of an absolutely necessary being.
Annihilate its existence in thought, and you annihilate the thing
itself with all its predicates; how then can there be any room for
contradiction? Externally, there is nothing to give rise to a
contradiction, for a thing cannot be necessary externally; nor
internally, for, by the annihilation or suppression of the thing
itself, its internal properties are also annihilated. God is
omnipotent--that is a necessary judgement. His omnipotence cannot be
denied, if the existence of a Deity is posited--the existence, that
is, of an infinite being, the two conceptions being identical. But
when you say, God does not exist, neither omnipotence nor any other
predicate is affirmed; they must all disappear with the subject, and
in this judgement there cannot exist the least self-contradiction.

You have thus seen that when the predicate of a judgement is
annihilated in thought along with the subject, no internal
contradiction can arise, be the predicate what it may. There is no
possibility of evading the conclusion--you find yourselves compelled
to declare: There are certain subjects which cannot be annihilated
in thought. But this is nothing more than saying: There exist subjects
which are absolutely necessary--the very hypothesis which you are
called upon to establish. For I find myself unable to form the
slightest conception of a thing which when annihilated in thought with
all its predicates, leaves behind a contradiction; and contradiction
is the only criterion of impossibility in the sphere of pure a
priori conceptions.

Against these general considerations, the justice of which no one
can dispute, one argument is adduced, which is regarded as
furnishing a satisfactory demonstration from the fact. It is
affirmed that there is one and only one conception, in which the
non-being or annihilation of the object is self-contradictory, and
this is the conception of an ens realissimum. It possesses, you say,
all reality, and you feel yourselves justified in admitting the
possibility of such a being. (This I am willing to grant for the
present, although the existence of a conception which is not
self-contradictory is far from being sufficient to prove the
possibility of an object.)* Now the notion of all reality embraces
in it that of existence; the notion of existence lies, therefore, in
the conception of this possible thing. If this thing is annihilated
in thought, the internal possibility of the thing is also annihilated,
which is self-contradictory.

[*Footnote: A conception is always possible, if it is not
self-contradictory. This is the logical criterion of possibility,
distinguishing the object of such a conception from the nihil negativum.
But it may be, notwithstanding, an empty conception, unless the objective
reality of this synthesis, but which it is generated, is demonstrated;
and a proof of this kind must be based upon principles of possible
experience, and not upon the principle of analysis or contradiction.
This remark may be serviceable as a warning against concluding, from
the possibility of a conception--which is logical--the possibility
of a thing--which is real.]

I answer: It is absurd to introduce--under whatever term
disguised--into the conception of a thing, which is to be cogitated
solely in reference to its possibility, the conception of its
existence. If this is admitted, you will have apparently gained the
day, but in reality have enounced nothing but a mere tautology. I ask,
is the proposition, this or that thing (which I am admitting to be
possible) exists, an analytical or a synthetical proposition? If the
former, there is no addition made to the subject of your thought by
the affirmation of its existence; but then the conception in your
minds is identical with the thing itself, or you have supposed the
existence of a thing to be possible, and then inferred its existence
from its internal possibility--which is but a miserable tautology.
The word reality in the conception of the thing, and the word existence
in the conception of the predicate, will not help you out of the
difficulty. For, supposing you were to term all positing of a thing
reality, you have thereby posited the thing with all its predicates
in the conception of the subject and assumed its actual existence,
and this you merely repeat in the predicate. But if you confess, as
every reasonable person must, that every existential proposition is
synthetical, how can it be maintained that the predicate of
existence cannot be denied without contradiction?--a property which
is the characteristic of analytical propositions, alone.

I should have a reasonable hope of putting an end for ever to this
sophistical mode of argumentation, by a strict definition of the
conception of existence, did not my own experience teach me that the
illusion arising from our confounding a logical with a real
predicate (a predicate which aids in the determination of a thing)
resists almost all the endeavours of explanation and illustration.
A logical predicate may be what you please, even the subject may be
predicated of itself; for logic pays no regard to the content of a
judgement. But the determination of a conception is a predicate, which
adds to and enlarges the conception. It must not, therefore, be
contained in the conception.

Being is evidently not a real predicate, that is, a conception of
something which is added to the conception of some other thing. It
is merely the positing of a thing, or of certain determinations in
it. Logically, it is merely the copula of a judgement. The proposition,
God is omnipotent, contains two conceptions, which have a certain
object or content; the word is, is no additional predicate--it
merely indicates the relation of the predicate to the subject. Now,
if I take the subject (God) with all its predicates (omnipotence being
one), and say: God is, or, There is a God, I add no new predicate to
the conception of God, I merely posit or affirm the existence of the
subject with all its predicates--I posit the object in relation to
my conception. The content of both is the same; and there is no
addition made to the conception, which expresses merely the
possibility of the object, by my cogitating the object--in the
expression, it is--as absolutely given or existing. Thus the real
contains no more than the possible. A hundred real dollars contain
no more than a hundred possible dollars. For, as the latter indicate
the conception, and the former the object, on the supposition that
the content of the former was greater than that of the latter, my
conception would not be an expression of the whole object, and would
consequently be an inadequate conception of it. But in reckoning my
wealth there may be said to be more in a hundred real dollars than
in a hundred possible dollars--that is, in the mere conception of
them. For the real object--the dollars--is not analytically
contained in my conception, but forms a synthetical addition to my
conception (which is merely a determination of my mental state),
although this objective reality--this existence--apart from my
conceptions, does not in the least degree increase the aforesaid
hundred dollars.

By whatever and by whatever number of predicates--even to the
complete determination of it--I may cogitate a thing, I do not in
the least augment the object of my conception by the addition of the
statement: This thing exists. Otherwise, not exactly the same, but
something more than what was cogitated in my conception, would
exist, and I could not affirm that the exact object of my conception
had real existence. If I cogitate a thing as containing all modes of
reality except one, the mode of reality which is absent is not added
to the conception of the thing by the affirmation that the thing
exists; on the contrary, the thing exists--if it exist at all--with
the same defect as that cogitated in its conception; otherwise not
that which was cogitated, but something different, exists. Now, if
I cogitate a being as the highest reality, without defect or
imperfection, the question still remains--whether this being exists
or not? For, although no element is wanting in the possible real
content of my conception, there is a defect in its relation to my
mental state, that is, I am ignorant whether the cognition of the
object indicated by the conception is possible a posteriori. And
here the cause of the present difficulty becomes apparent. If the
question regarded an object of sense merely, it would be impossible
for me to confound the conception with the existence of a thing. For
the conception merely enables me to cogitate an object as according
with the general conditions of experience; while the existence of
the object permits me to cogitate it as contained in the sphere of
actual experience. At the same time, this connection with the world
of experience does not in the least augment the conception, although
a possible perception has been added to the experience of the mind.
But if we cogitate existence by the pure category alone, it is not
to be wondered at, that we should find ourselves unable to present
any criterion sufficient to distinguish it from mere possibility.

Whatever be the content of our conception of an object, it is
necessary to go beyond it, if we wish to predicate existence of the
object. In the case of sensuous objects, this is attained by their
connection according to empirical laws with some one of my
perceptions; but there is no means of cognizing the existence of
objects of pure thought, because it must be cognized completely a
priori. But all our knowledge of existence (be it immediately by
perception, or by inferences connecting some object with a perception)
belongs entirely to the sphere of experience--which is in perfect
unity with itself; and although an existence out of this sphere cannot
be absolutely declared to be impossible, it is a hypothesis the
truth of which we have no means of ascertaining.

The notion of a Supreme Being is in many respects a highly useful
idea; but for the very reason that it is an idea, it is incapable of
enlarging our cognition with regard to the existence of things. It
is not even sufficient to instruct us as to the possibility of a being
which we do not know to exist. The analytical criterion of
possibility, which consists in the absence of contradiction in
propositions, cannot be denied it. But the connection of real
properties in a thing is a synthesis of the possibility of which an
a priori judgement cannot be formed, because these realities are not
presented to us specifically; and even if this were to happen, a
judgement would still be impossible, because the criterion of the
possibility of synthetical cognitions must be sought for in the
world of experience, to which the object of an idea cannot belong.
And thus the celebrated Leibnitz has utterly failed in his attempt
to establish upon a priori grounds the possibility of this sublime
ideal being.

The celebrated ontological or Cartesian argument for the existence
of a Supreme Being is therefore insufficient; and we may as well
hope to increase our stock of knowledge by the aid of mere ideas, as
the merchant to augment his wealth by the addition of noughts to his
cash account.

SECTION V. Of the Impossibility of a Cosmological Proof of the Existence of God.

It was by no means a natural course of proceeding, but, on the
contrary, an invention entirely due to the subtlety of the schools,
to attempt to draw from a mere idea a proof of the existence of an
object corresponding to it. Such a course would never have been pursued,
were it not for that need of reason which requires it to suppose the
existence of a necessary being as a basis for the empirical regress,
and that, as this necessity must be unconditioned and a priori, reason
is bound to discover a conception which shall satisfy, if possible,
this requirement, and enable us to attain to the a priori cognition
of such a being. This conception was thought to be found in the idea
of an ens realissimum, and thus this idea was employed for the attainment
of a better defined knowledge of a necessary being, of the existence
of which we were convinced, or persuaded, on other grounds. Thus
reason was seduced from her natural courage; and, instead of
concluding with the conception of an ens realissimum, an attempt was
made to begin with it, for the purpose of inferring from it that
idea of a necessary existence which it was in fact called in to
complete. Thus arose that unfortunate ontological argument, which
neither satisfies the healthy common sense of humanity, nor sustains
the scientific examination of the philosopher.

The cosmological proof, which we are about to examine, retains the
connection between absolute necessity and the highest reality; but,
instead of reasoning from this highest reality to a necessary
existence, like the preceding argument, it concludes from the given
unconditioned necessity of some being its unlimited reality. The track
it pursues, whether rational or sophistical, is at least natural,
and not only goes far to persuade the common understanding, but
shows itself deserving of respect from the speculative intellect;
while it contains, at the same time, the outlines of all the arguments
employed in natural theology--arguments which always have been, and
still will be, in use and authority. These, however adorned, and hid
under whatever embellishments of rhetoric and sentiment, are at bottom
identical with the arguments we are at present to discuss. This proof,
termed by Leibnitz the argumentum a contingentia mundi, I shall now
lay before the reader, and subject to a strict examination.

It is framed in the following manner: If something exists, an
absolutely necessary being must likewise exist. Now I, at least,
exist. Consequently, there exists an absolutely necessary being. The
minor contains an experience, the major reasons from a general
experience to the existence of a necessary being.* Thus this
argument really begins at experience, and is not completely a
priori, or ontological. The object of all possible experience being
the world, it is called the cosmological proof. It contains no
reference to any peculiar property of sensuous objects, by which
this world of sense might be distinguished from other possible worlds;
and in this respect it differs from the physico-theological proof,
which is based upon the consideration of the peculiar constitution
of our sensuous world.

[*Footnote: This inference is too well known to require more detailed
discussion. It is based upon the spurious transcendental law of
causality, that everything which is contingent has a cause, which,
if itself contingent, must also have a cause; and so on, till the
series of subordinated causes must end with an absolutely necessary
cause, without which it would not possess completeness.]

The proof proceeds thus: A necessary being can be determined only in
one way, that is, it can be determined by only one of all possible
opposed predicates; consequently, it must be completely determined
in and by its conception. But there is only a single conception of
a thing possible, which completely determines the thing a priori: that
is, the conception of the ens realissimum. It follows that the
conception of the ens realissimum is the only conception by and in
which we can cogitate a necessary being. Consequently, a Supreme Being
necessarily exists.

In this cosmological argument are assembled so many sophistical
propositions that speculative reason seems to have exerted in it all
her dialectical skill to produce a transcendental illusion of the most
extreme character. We shall postpone an investigation of this argument
for the present, and confine ourselves to exposing the stratagem by
which it imposes upon us an old argument in a new dress, and appeals
to the agreement of two witnesses, the one with the credentials of
pure reason, and the other with those of empiricism; while, in fact,
it is only the former who has changed his dress and voice, for the
purpose of passing himself off for an additional witness. That it
may possess a secure foundation, it bases its conclusions upon
experience, and thus appears to be completely distinct from the
ontological argument, which places its confidence entirely in pure
a priori conceptions. But this experience merely aids reason in making
one step--to the existence of a necessary being. What the properties
of this being are cannot be learned from experience; and therefore
reason abandons it altogether, and pursues its inquiries in the sphere
of pure conception, for the purpose of discovering what the properties
of an absolutely necessary being ought to be, that is, what among
all possible things contain the conditions (requisita) of absolute
necessity. Reason believes that it has discovered these requisites
in the conception of an ens realissimum--and in it alone, and hence
concludes: The ens realissimum is an absolutely necessary being. But
it is evident that reason has here presupposed that the conception
of an ens realissimum is perfectly adequate to the conception of a
being of absolute necessity, that is, that we may infer the
existence of the latter from that of the former--a proposition which
formed the basis of the ontological argument, and which is now
employed in the support of the cosmological argument, contrary to
the wish and professions of its inventors. For the existence of an
absolutely necessary being is given in conceptions alone. But if I
say: "The conception of the ens realissimum is a conception of this
kind, and in fact the only conception which is adequate to our idea
of a necessary being," I am obliged to admit, that the latter may be
inferred from the former. Thus it is properly the ontological argument
which figures in the cosmological, and constitutes the whole
strength of the latter; while the spurious basis of experience has
been of no further use than to conduct us to the conception of
absolute necessity, being utterly insufficient to demonstrate the
presence of this attribute in any determinate existence or thing.
For when we propose to ourselves an aim of this character, we must
abandon the sphere of experience, and rise to that of pure
conceptions, which we examine with the purpose of discovering
whether any one contains the conditions of the possibility of an
absolutely necessary being. But if the possibility of such a being
is thus demonstrated, its existence is also proved; for we may then
assert that, of all possible beings there is one which possesses the
attribute of necessity--in other words, this being possesses an
absolutely necessary existence.

All illusions in an argument are more easily detected when they
are presented in the formal manner employed by the schools, which we
now proceed to do.

If the proposition: "Every absolutely necessary being is likewise an
ens realissimum," is correct (and it is this which constitutes the
nervus probandi of the cosmological argument), it must, like all
affirmative judgements, be capable of conversion--the conversio per
accidens, at least. It follows, then, that some entia realissima are
absolutely necessary beings. But no ens realissimum is in any
respect different from another, and what is valid of some is valid
of all. In this present case, therefore, I may employ simple
conversion, and say: "Every ens realissimum is a necessary being."
But as this proposition is determined a priori by the conceptions
contained in it, the mere conception of an ens realissimum must
possess the additional attribute of absolute necessity. But this is
exactly what was maintained in the ontological argument, and not
recognized by the cosmological, although it formed the real ground
of its disguised and illusory reasoning.

Thus the second mode employed by speculative reason of demonstrating
the existence of a Supreme Being, is not only, like the first,
illusory and inadequate, but possesses the additional blemish of an
ignoratio elenchi--professing to conduct us by a new road to the
desired goal, but bringing us back, after a short circuit, to the
old path which we had deserted at its call.

I mentioned above that this cosmological argument contains a perfect
nest of dialectical assumptions, which transcendental criticism does
not find it difficult to expose and to dissipate. I shall merely
enumerate these, leaving it to the reader, who must by this time be
well practised in such matters, to investigate the fallacies
residing therein.

The following fallacies, for example, are discoverable in this
mode of proof: 1. The transcendental principle: "Everything that is
contingent must have a cause"--a principle without significance,
except in the sensuous world. For the purely intellectual conception
of the contingent cannot produce any synthetical proposition, like
that of causality, which is itself without significance or
distinguishing characteristic except in the phenomenal world. But in
the present case it is employed to help us beyond the limits of its
sphere. 2. "From the impossibility of an infinite ascending series
of causes in the world of sense a first cause is inferred"; a
conclusion which the principles of the employment of reason do not
justify even in the sphere of experience, and still less when an
attempt is made to pass the limits of this sphere. 3. Reason allows
itself to be satisfied upon insufficient grounds, with regard to the
completion of this series. It removes all conditions (without which,
however, no conception of Necessity can take place); and, as after
this it is beyond our power to form any other conceptions, it
accepts this as a completion of the conception it wishes to form of
the series. 4. The logical possibility of a conception of the total
of reality (the criterion of this possibility being the absence of
contradiction) is confounded with the transcendental, which requires
a principle of the practicability of such a synthesis--a principle
which again refers us to the world of experience. And so on.

The aim of the cosmological argument is to avoid the necessity of
proving the existence of a necessary being priori from mere
conceptions--a proof which must be ontological, and of which we feel
ourselves quite incapable. With this purpose, we reason from an actual
existence--an experience in general, to an absolutely necessary
condition of that existence. It is in this case unnecessary to
demonstrate its possibility. For after having proved that it exists,
the question regarding its possibility is superfluous. Now, when we
wish to define more strictly the nature of this necessary being, we
do not look out for some being the conception of which would enable
us to comprehend the necessity of its being--for if we could do this,
an empirical presupposition would be unnecessary; no, we try to
discover merely the negative condition (conditio sine qua non),
without which a being would not be absolutely necessary. Now this
would be perfectly admissible in every sort of reasoning, from a
consequence to its principle; but in the present case it unfortunately
happens that the condition of absolute necessity can be discovered
in but a single being, the conception of which must consequently
contain all that is requisite for demonstrating the presence of
absolute necessity, and thus entitle me to infer this absolute
necessity a priori. That is, it must be possible to reason conversely,
and say: The thing, to which the conception of the highest reality
belongs, is absolutely necessary. But if I cannot reason thus--and
I cannot, unless I believe in the sufficiency of the ontological
argument--I find insurmountable obstacles in my new path, and am
really no farther than the point from which I set out. The
conception of a Supreme Being satisfies all questions a priori
regarding the internal determinations of a thing, and is for this
reason an ideal without equal or parallel, the general conception of
it indicating it as at the same time an ens individuum among all
possible things. But the conception does not satisfy the question
regarding its existence--which was the purpose of all our inquiries;
and, although the existence of a necessary being were admitted, we
should find it impossible to answer the question: What of all things
in the world must be regarded as such?

It is certainly allowable to admit the existence of an
all-sufficient being--a cause of all possible effects--for the purpose
of enabling reason to introduce unity into its mode and grounds of
explanation with regard to phenomena. But to assert that such a
being necessarily exists, is no longer the modest enunciation of an
admissible hypothesis, but the boldest declaration of an apodeictic
certainty; for the cognition of that which is absolutely necessary
must itself possess that character.

The aim of the transcendental ideal formed by the mind is either
to discover a conception which shall harmonize with the idea of
absolute necessity, or a conception which shall contain that idea.
If the one is possible, so is the other; for reason recognizes that
alone as absolutely necessary which is necessary from its
conception. But both attempts are equally beyond our power--we find
it impossible to satisfy the understanding upon this point, and as
impossible to induce it to remain at rest in relation to this
incapacity.

Unconditioned necessity, which, as the ultimate support and stay
of all existing things, is an indispensable requirement of the mind,
is an abyss on the verge of which human reason trembles in dismay.
Even the idea of eternity, terrible and sublime as it is, as
depicted by Haller, does not produce upon the mental vision such a
feeling of awe and terror; for, although it measures the duration of
things, it does not support them. We cannot bear, nor can we rid
ourselves of the thought that a being, which we regard as the greatest
of all possible existences, should say to himself: I am from
eternity to eternity; beside me there is nothing, except that which
exists by my will; whence then am I? Here all sinks away from under
us; and the greatest, as the smallest, perfection, hovers without stay
or footing in presence of the speculative reason, which finds it as
easy to part with the one as with the other.

Many physical powers, which evidence their existence by their
effects, are perfectly inscrutable in their nature; they elude all
our powers of observation. The transcendental object which forms the
basis of phenomena, and, in connection with it, the reason why our
sensibility possesses this rather than that particular kind of
conditions, are and must ever remain hidden from our mental vision;
the fact is there, the reason of the fact we cannot see. But an
ideal of pure reason cannot be termed mysterious or inscrutable,
because the only credential of its reality is the need of it felt by
reason, for the purpose of giving completeness to the world of
synthetical unity. An ideal is not even given as a cogitable object,
and therefore cannot be inscrutable; on the contrary, it must, as a
mere idea, be based on the constitution of reason itself, and on
this account must be capable of explanation and solution. For the very
essence of reason consists in its ability to give an account, of all
our conceptions, opinions, and assertions--upon objective, or, when
they happen to be illusory and fallacious, upon subjective grounds.

Detection and Explanation of the Dialectical Illusion in all Transcendental Arguments for the Existence of a Necessary Being.

Both of the above arguments are transcendental; in other words, they
do not proceed upon empirical principles. For, although the
cosmological argument professed to lay a basis of experience for its
edifice of reasoning, it did not ground its procedure upon the
peculiar constitution of experience, but upon pure principles of
reason--in relation to an existence given by empirical
consciousness; utterly abandoning its guidance, however, for the
purpose of supporting its assertions entirely upon pure conceptions.
Now what is the cause, in these transcendental arguments, of the
dialectical, but natural, illusion, which connects the conceptions
of necessity and supreme reality, and hypostatizes that which cannot
be anything but an idea? What is the cause of this unavoidable step
on the part of reason, of admitting that some one among all existing
things must be necessary, while it falls back from the assertion of
the existence of such a being as from an abyss? And how does reason
proceed to explain this anomaly to itself, and from the wavering
condition of a timid and reluctant approbation--always again
withdrawn--arrive at a calm and settled insight into its cause?

It is something very remarkable that, on the supposition that
something exists, I cannot avoid the inference that something exists
necessarily. Upon this perfectly natural--but not on that account
reliable--inference does the cosmological argument rest. But, let me
form any conception whatever of a thing, I find that I cannot cogitate
the existence of the thing as absolutely necessary, and that nothing
prevents me--be the thing or being what it may--from cogitating its
non-existence. I may thus be obliged to admit that all existing things
have a necessary basis, while I cannot cogitate any single or
individual thing as necessary. In other words, I can never complete
the regress through the conditions of existence, without admitting
the existence of a necessary being; but, on the other hand, I cannot
make a commencement from this being.

If I must cogitate something as existing necessarily as the basis of
existing things, and yet am not permitted to cogitate any individual
thing as in itself necessary, the inevitable inference is that
necessity and contingency are not properties of things themselves-
otherwise an internal contradiction would result; that consequently
neither of these principles are objective, but merely subjective
principles of reason--the one requiring us to seek for a necessary
ground for everything that exists, that is, to be satisfied with no
other explanation than that which is complete a priori, the other
forbidding us ever to hope for the attainment of this completeness,
that is, to regard no member of the empirical world as
unconditioned. In this mode of viewing them, both principles, in their
purely heuristic and regulative character, and as concerning merely
the formal interest of reason, are quite consistent with each other.
The one says: "You must philosophize upon nature," as if there existed
a necessary primal basis of all existing things, solely for the
purpose of introducing systematic unity into your knowledge, by
pursuing an idea of this character--a foundation which is
arbitrarily admitted to be ultimate; while the other warns you to
consider no individual determination, concerning the existence of
things, as such an ultimate foundation, that is, as absolutely
necessary, but to keep the way always open for further progress in
the deduction, and to treat every determination as determined by some
other. But if all that we perceive must be regarded as conditionally
necessary, it is impossible that anything which is empirically given
should be absolutely necessary.

It follows from this that you must accept the absolutely necessary
as out of and beyond the world, inasmuch as it is useful only as a
principle of the highest possible unity in experience, and you
cannot discover any such necessary existence in the would, the
second rule requiring you to regard all empirical causes of unity as
themselves deduced.

The philosophers of antiquity regarded all the forms of nature as
contingent; while matter was considered by them, in accordance with
the judgement of the common reason of mankind, as primal and
necessary. But if they had regarded matter, not relatively--as the
substratum of phenomena, but absolutely and in itself--as an
independent existence, this idea of absolute necessity would have
immediately disappeared. For there is nothing absolutely connecting
reason with such an existence; on the contrary, it can annihilate it
in thought, always and without self-contradiction. But in thought
alone lay the idea of absolute necessity. A regulative principle must,
therefore, have been at the foundation of this opinion. In fact,
extension and impenetrability--which together constitute our
conception of matter--form the supreme empirical principle of the
unity of phenomena, and this principle, in so far as it is empirically
unconditioned, possesses the property of a regulative principle.
But, as every determination of matter which constitutes what is real
in it--and consequently impenetrability--is an effect, which must have
a cause, and is for this reason always derived, the notion of matter
cannot harmonize with the idea of a necessary being, in its
character of the principle of all derived unity. For every one of
its real properties, being derived, must be only conditionally
necessary, and can therefore be annihilated in thought; and thus the
whole existence of matter can be so annihilated or suppressed. If this
were not the case, we should have found in the world of phenomena
the highest ground or condition of unity--which is impossible,
according to the second regulative principle. It follows that
matter, and, in general, all that forms part of the world of sense,
cannot be a necessary primal being, nor even a principle of
empirical unity, but that this being or principle must have its
place assigned without the world. And, in this way, we can proceed
in perfect confidence to deduce the phenomena of the world and their
existence from other phenomena, just as if there existed no
necessary being; and we can at the same time, strive without ceasing
towards the attainment of completeness for our deduction, just as if
such a being--the supreme condition of all existences--were
presupposed by the mind.

These remarks will have made it evident to the reader that the ideal
of the Supreme Being, far from being an enouncement of the existence
of a being in itself necessary, is nothing more than a regulative
principle of reason, requiring us to regard all connection existing
between phenomena as if it had its origin from an all-sufficient
necessary cause, and basing upon this the rule of a systematic and
necessary unity in the explanation of phenomena. We cannot, at the
same time, avoid regarding, by a transcendental subreptio, this formal
principle as constitutive, and hypostatizing this unity. Precisely
similar is the case with our notion of space. Space is the primal
condition of all forms, which are properly just so many different
limitations of it; and thus, although it is merely a principle of
sensibility, we cannot help regarding it as an absolutely necessary
and self-subsistent thing--as an object given a priori in itself. In
the same way, it is quite natural that, as the systematic unity of
nature cannot be established as a principle for the empirical
employment of reason, unless it is based upon the idea of an ens
realissimum, as the supreme cause, we should regard this idea as a
real object, and this object, in its character of supreme condition,
as absolutely necessary, and that in this way a regulative should be
transformed into a constitutive principle. This interchange becomes
evident when I regard this supreme being, which, relatively to the
world, was absolutely (unconditionally) necessary, as a thing per
se. In this case, I find it impossible to represent this necessity
in or by any conception, and it exists merely in my own mind, as the
formal condition of thought, but not as a material and hypostatic
condition of existence.

SECTION VI. Of the Impossibility of a Physico-Theological Proof.

If, then, neither a pure conception nor the general experience of an
existing being can provide a sufficient basis for the proof of the
existence of the Deity, we can make the attempt by the only other
mode--that of grounding our argument upon a determinate experience
of the phenomena of the present world, their constitution and
disposition, and discover whether we can thus attain to a sound
conviction of the existence of a Supreme Being. This argument we shall
term the physico-theological argument. If it is shown to be
insufficient, speculative reason cannot present us with any
satisfactory proof of the existence of a being corresponding to our
transcendental idea.

It is evident from the remarks that have been made in the
preceding sections, that an answer to this question will be far from
being difficult or unconvincing. For how can any experience be
adequate with an idea? The very essence of an idea consists in the
fact that no experience can ever be discovered congruent or adequate
with it. The transcendental idea of a necessary and all-sufficient
being is so immeasurably great, so high above all that is empirical,
which is always conditioned, that we hope in vain to find materials
in the sphere of experience sufficiently ample for our conception,
and in vain seek the unconditioned among things that are conditioned,
while examples, nay, even guidance is denied us by the laws of empirical
synthesis.

If the Supreme Being forms a link in the chain of empirical
conditions, it must be a member of the empirical series, and, like
the lower members which it precedes, have its origin in some higher
member of the series. If, on the other hand, we disengage it from the
chain, and cogitate it as an intelligible being, apart from the series
of natural causes--how shall reason bridge the abyss that separates
the latter from the former? All laws respecting the regress from
effects to causes, all synthetical additions to our knowledge relate
solely to possible experience and the objects of the sensuous world,
and, apart from them, are without significance.

The world around us opens before our view so magnificent a spectacle
of order, variety, beauty, and conformity to ends, that whether we
pursue our observations into the infinity of space in the one
direction, or into its illimitable divisions in the other, whether
we regard the world in its greatest or its least manifestations-
even after we have attained to the highest summit of knowledge which
our weak minds can reach, we find that language in the presence of
wonders so inconceivable has lost its force, and number its power to
reckon, nay, even thought fails to conceive adequately, and our
conception of the whole dissolves into an astonishment without power
of expression--all the more eloquent that it is dumb. Everywhere
around us we observe a chain of causes and effects, of means and ends,
of death and birth; and, as nothing has entered of itself into the
condition in which we find it, we are constantly referred to some
other thing, which itself suggests the same inquiry regarding its
cause, and thus the universe must sink into the abyss of
nothingness, unless we admit that, besides this infinite chain of
contingencies, there exists something that is primal and
self-subsistent--something which, as the cause of this phenomenal
world, secures its continuance and preservation.

This highest cause--what magnitude shall we attribute to it? Of
the content of the world we are ignorant; still less can we estimate
its magnitude by comparison with the sphere of the possible. But
this supreme cause being a necessity of the human mind, what is
there to prevent us from attributing to it such a degree of perfection
as to place it above the sphere of all that is possible? This we can
easily do, although only by the aid of the faint outline of an
abstract conception, by representing this being to ourselves as
containing in itself, as an individual substance, all possible
perfection--a conception which satisfies that requirement of reason
which demands parsimony in principles, which is free from
self-contradiction, which even contributes to the extension of the
employment of reason in experience, by means of the guidance
afforded by this idea to order and system, and which in no respect
conflicts with any law of experience.

This argument always deserves to be mentioned with respect. It is
the oldest, the clearest, and that most in conformity with the
common reason of humanity. It animates the study of nature, as it
itself derives its existence and draws ever new strength from that
source. It introduces aims and ends into a sphere in which our
observation could not of itself have discovered them, and extends
our knowledge of nature, by directing our attention to a unity, the
principle of which lies beyond nature. This knowledge of nature
again reacts upon this idea--its cause; and thus our belief in a
divine author of the universe rises to the power of an irresistible
conviction.

For these reasons it would be utterly hopeless to attempt to rob
this argument of the authority it has always enjoyed. The mind,
unceasingly elevated by these considerations, which, although
empirical, are so remarkably powerful, and continually adding to their
force, will not suffer itself to be depressed by the doubts
suggested by subtle speculation; it tears itself out of this state
of uncertainty, the moment it casts a look upon the wondrous forms
of nature and the majesty of the universe, and rises from height to
height, from condition to condition, till it has elevated itself to
the supreme and unconditioned author of all.

But although we have nothing to object to the reasonableness and
utility of this procedure, but have rather to commend and encourage
it, we cannot approve of the claims which this argument advances to
demonstrative certainty and to a reception upon its own merits,
apart from favour or support by other arguments. Nor can it injure
the cause of morality to endeavour to lower the tone of the arrogant
sophist, and to teach him that modesty and moderation which are the
properties of a belief that brings calm and content into the mind,
without prescribing to it an unworthy subjection. I maintain, then,
that the physico-theological argument is insufficient of itself to
prove the existence of a Supreme Being, that it must entrust this to
the ontological argument--to which it serves merely as an
introduction, and that, consequently, this argument contains the
only possible ground of proof (possessed by speculative reason) for
the existence of this being.

The chief momenta in the physico-theological argument are as follow:
1. We observe in the world manifest signs of an arrangement full of
purpose, executed with great wisdom, and argument in whole of a
content indescribably various, and of an extent without limits. 2.
This arrangement of means and ends is entirely foreign to the things
existing in the world--it belongs to them merely as a contingent
attribute; in other words, the nature of different things could not
of itself, whatever means were employed, harmoniously tend towards
certain purposes, were they not chosen and directed for these purposes
by a rational and disposing principle, in accordance with certain
fundamental ideas. 3. There exists, therefore, a sublime and wise
cause (or several), which is not merely a blind, all-powerful
nature, producing the beings and events which fill the world in
unconscious fecundity, but a free and intelligent cause of the
world. 4. The unity of this cause may be inferred from the unity of
the reciprocal relation existing between the parts of the world, as
portions of an artistic edifice--an inference which all our
observation favours, and all principles of analogy support.

In the above argument, it is inferred from the analogy of certain
products of nature with those of human art, when it compels Nature
to bend herself to its purposes, as in the case of a house, a ship,
or a watch, that the same kind of causality--namely, understanding
and will--resides in nature. It is also declared that the internal
possibility of this freely-acting nature (which is the source of all
art, and perhaps also of human reason) is derivable from another and
superhuman art--a conclusion which would perhaps be found incapable
of standing the test of subtle transcendental criticism. But to neither
of these opinions shall we at present object. We shall only remark
that it must be confessed that, if we are to discuss the subject of
cause at all, we cannot proceed more securely than with the guidance
of the analogy subsisting between nature and such products of
design--these being the only products whose causes and modes of
organization are completely known to us. Reason would be unable to
satisfy her own requirements, if she passed from a causality which
she does know, to obscure and indemonstrable principles of explanation
which she does not know.

According to the physico-theological argument, the connection and
harmony existing in the world evidence the contingency of the form
merely, but not of the matter, that is, of the substance of the world.
To establish the truth of the latter opinion, it would be necessary
to prove that all things would be in themselves incapable of this harmony
and order, unless they were, even as regards their substance, the
product of a supreme wisdom. But this would require very different
grounds of proof from those presented by the analogy with human art.
This proof can at most, therefore, demonstrate the existence of an
architect of the world, whose efforts are limited by the
capabilities of the material with which he works, but not of a creator
of the world, to whom all things are subject. Thus this argument is
utterly insufficient for the task before us--a demonstration of the
existence of an all-sufficient being. If we wish to prove the
contingency of matter, we must have recourse to a transcendental
argument, which the physico-theological was constructed expressly to
avoid.

We infer, from the order and design visible in the universe, as a
disposition of a thoroughly contingent character, the existence of
a cause proportionate thereto. The conception of this cause must contain
certain determinate qualities, and it must therefore be regarded as
the conception of a being which possesses all power, wisdom, and so
on, in one word, all perfection--the conception, that is, of an
all-sufficient being. For the predicates of very great, astonishing,
or immeasurable power and excellence, give us no determinate
conception of the thing, nor do they inform us what the thing may be
in itself. They merely indicate the relation existing between the
magnitude of the object and the observer, who compares it with himself
and with his own power of comprehension, and are mere expressions of
praise and reverence, by which the object is either magnified, or
the observing subject depreciated in relation to the object. Where
we have to do with the magnitude (of the perfection) of a thing, we
can discover no determinate conception, except that which
comprehends all possible perfection or completeness, and it is only
the total (omnitudo) of reality which is completely determined in
and through its conception alone.

Now it cannot be expected that any one will be bold enough to
declare that he has a perfect insight into the relation which the
magnitude of the world he contemplates bears (in its extent as well
as in its content) to omnipotence, into that of the order and design
in the world to the highest wisdom, and that of the unity of the world
to the absolute unity of a Supreme Being. Physico-theology is therefore
incapable of presenting a determinate conception of a supreme cause
of the world, and is therefore insufficient as a principle of theology--a
theology which is itself to be the basis of religion.

The attainment of absolute totality is completely impossible on
the path of empiricism. And yet this is the path pursued in the
physico-theological argument. What means shall we employ to bridge
the abyss?

After elevating ourselves to admiration of the magnitude of the
power, wisdom, and other attributes of the author of the world, and
finding we can advance no further, we leave the argument on
empirical grounds, and proceed to infer the contingency of the world
from the order and conformity to aims that are observable in it.
From this contingency we infer, by the help of transcendental
conceptions alone, the existence of something absolutely necessary;
and, still advancing, proceed from the conception of the absolute
necessity of the first cause to the completely determined or
determining conception thereof--the conception of an all-embracing
reality. Thus the physico-theological, failing in its undertaking,
recurs in its embarrassment to the cosmological argument; and, as this
is merely the ontological argument in disguise, it executes its design
solely by the aid of pure reason, although it at first professed to
have no connection with this faculty and to base its entire
procedure upon experience alone.

The physico-theologians have therefore no reason to regard with such
contempt the transcendental mode of argument, and to look down upon
it, with the conceit of clear-sighted observers of nature, as the
brain-cobweb of obscure speculatists. For, if they reflect upon and
examine their own arguments, they will find that, after following
for some time the path of nature and experience, and discovering
themselves no nearer their object, they suddenly leave this path and
pass into the region of pure possibility, where they hope to reach
upon the wings of ideas what had eluded all their empirical
investigations. Gaining, as they think, a firm footing after this
immense leap, they extend their determinate conception--into the
possession of which they have come, they know not how--over the
whole sphere of creation, and explain their ideal, which is entirely
a product of pure reason, by illustrations drawn from experience--though
in a degree miserably unworthy of the grandeur of the object, while
they refuse to acknowledge that they have arrived at this cognition
or hypothesis by a very different road from that of experience.

Thus the physico-theological is based upon the cosmological, and
this upon the ontological proof of the existence of a Supreme Being;
and as besides these three there is no other path open to
speculative reason, the ontological proof, on the ground of pure
conceptions of reason, is the only possible one, if any proof of a
proposition so far transcending the empirical exercise of the
understanding is possible at all.

SECTION VII. Critique of all Theology based upon Speculative Principles of Reason.

If by the term theology I understand the cognition of a primal
being, that cognition is based either upon reason alone (theologia
rationalis) or upon revelation (theologia revelata). The former
cogitates its object either by means of pure transcendental
conceptions, as an ens originarium, realissimum, ens entium, and is
termed transcendental theology; or, by means of a conception derived
from the nature of our own mind, as a supreme intelligence, and must
then be entitled natural theology. The person who believes in a
transcendental theology alone, is termed a deist; he who
acknowledges the possibility of a natural theology also, a theist.
The former admits that we can cognize by pure reason alone the existence
of a Supreme Being, but at the same time maintains that our conception
of this being is purely transcendental, and that all we can say of
it is that it possesses all reality, without being able to define it
more closely. The second asserts that reason is capable of
presenting us, from the analogy with nature, with a more definite
conception of this being, and that its operations, as the cause of
all things, are the results of intelligence and free will. The former
regards the Supreme Being as the cause of the world--whether by the
necessity of his nature, or as a free agent, is left undetermined;
the latter considers this being as the author of the world.

Transcendental theology aims either at inferring the existence of
a Supreme Being from a general experience, without any closer
reference to the world to which this experience belongs, and in this
case it is called cosmotheology; or it endeavours to cognize the
existence of such a being, through mere conceptions, without the aid
of experience, and is then termed ontotheology.

Natural theology infers the attributes and the existence of an
author of the world, from the constitution of, the order and unity
observable in, the world, in which two modes of causality must be
admitted to exist--those of nature and freedom. Thus it rises from
this world to a supreme intelligence, either as the principle of all
natural, or of all moral order and perfection. In the former case it
is termed physico-theology, in the latter, ethical or moral-theology.*

[*Footnote: Not theological ethics; for this science contains ethical
laws, which presuppose the existence of a Supreme Governor of the world;
while moral-theology, on the contrary, is the expression of a
conviction of the existence of a Supreme Being, founded upon ethical
laws.]

As we are wont to understand by the term God not merely an eternal
nature, the operations of which are insensate and blind, but a Supreme
Being, who is the free and intelligent author of all things, and as
it is this latter view alone that can be of interest to humanity, we
might, in strict rigour, deny to the deist any belief in God at all,
and regard him merely as a maintainer of the existence of a primal
being or thing--the supreme cause of all other things. But, as no
one ought to be blamed, merely because he does not feel himself
justified in maintaining a certain opinion, as if he altogether denied
its truth and asserted the opposite, it is more correct--as it is less
harsh--to say, the deist believes in a God, the theist in a living
God (summa intelligentia). We shall now proceed to investigate the
sources of all these attempts of reason to establish the existence
of a Supreme Being.

It may be sufficient in this place to define theoretical knowledge
or cognition as knowledge of that which is, and practical knowledge
as knowledge of that which ought to be. In this view, the theoretical
employment of reason is that by which I cognize a priori (as
necessary) that something is, while the practical is that by which
I cognize a priori what ought to happen. Now, if it is an indubitably
certain, though at the same time an entirely conditioned truth, that
something is, or ought to happen, either a certain determinate
condition of this truth is absolutely necessary, or such a condition
may be arbitrarily presupposed. In the former case the condition is
postulated (per thesin), in the latter supposed (per hypothesin).
There are certain practical laws--those of morality--which are
absolutely necessary. Now, if these laws necessarily presuppose the
existence of some being, as the condition of the possibility of
their obligatory power, this being must be postulated, because the
conditioned, from which we reason to this determinate condition, is
itself cognized a priori as absolutely necessary. We shall at some
future time show that the moral laws not merely presuppose the
existence of a Supreme Being, but also, as themselves absolutely
necessary in a different relation, demand or postulate it--although
only from a practical point of view. The discussion of this argument
we postpone for the present.

When the question relates merely to that which is, not to that which
ought to be, the conditioned which is presented in experience is
always cogitated as contingent. For this reason its condition cannot
be regarded as absolutely necessary, but merely as relatively
necessary, or rather as needful; the condition is in itself and a
priori a mere arbitrary presupposition in aid of the cognition, by
reason, of the conditioned. If, then, we are to possess a
theoretical cognition of the absolute necessity of a thing, we
cannot attain to this cognition otherwise than a priori by means of
conceptions; while it is impossible in this way to cognize the
existence of a cause which bears any relation to an existence given
in experience.

Theoretical cognition is speculative when it relates to an object or
certain conceptions of an object which is not given and cannot be
discovered by means of experience. It is opposed to the cognition of
nature, which concerns only those objects or predicates which can be
presented in a possible experience.

The principle that everything which happens (the empirically
contingent) must have a cause, is a principle of the cognition of
nature, but not of speculative cognition. For, if we change it into
an abstract principle, and deprive it of its reference to experience
and the empirical, we shall find that it cannot with justice be
regarded any longer as a synthetical proposition, and that it is
impossible to discover any mode of transition from that which exists
to something entirely different--termed cause. Nay, more, the
conception of a cause likewise that of the contingent--loses, in
this speculative mode of employing it, all significance, for its
objective reality and meaning are comprehensible from experience
alone.

When from the existence of the universe and the things in it the
existence of a cause of the universe is inferred, reason is proceeding
not in the natural, but in the speculative method. For the principle
of the former enounces, not that things themselves or substances,
but only that which happens or their states--as empirically
contingent, have a cause: the assertion that the existence of
substance itself is contingent is not justified by experience, it is
the assertion of a reason employing its principles in a speculative
manner. If, again, I infer from the form of the universe, from the
way in which all things are connected and act and react upon each other,
the existence of a cause entirely distinct from the universe--this
would again be a judgement of purely speculative reason; because the
object in this case--the cause--can never be an object of possible
experience. In both these cases the principle of causality, which is
valid only in the field of experience--useless and even meaningless
beyond this region, would be diverted from its proper destination.

Now I maintain that all attempts of reason to establish a theology
by the aid of speculation alone are fruitless, that the principles
of reason as applied to nature do not conduct us to any theological
truths, and, consequently, that a rational theology can have no
existence, unless it is founded upon the laws of morality. For all
synthetical principles of the understanding are valid only as immanent
in experience; while the cognition of a Supreme Being necessitates
their being employed transcendentally, and of this the understanding
is quite incapable. If the empirical law of causality is to conduct
us to a Supreme Being, this being must belong to the chain of empirical
objects--in which case it would be, like all phenomena, itself
conditioned. If the possibility of passing the limits of experience
be admitted, by means of the dynamical law of the relation of an effect
to its cause, what kind of conception shall we obtain by this
procedure? Certainly not the conception of a Supreme Being, because
experience never presents us with the greatest of all possible
effects, and it is only an effect of this character that could witness
to the existence of a corresponding cause. If, for the purpose of
fully satisfying the requirements of Reason, we recognize her right
to assert the existence of a perfect and absolutely necessary being,
this can be admitted only from favour, and cannot be regarded as the
result or irresistible demonstration. The physico-theological proof
may add weight to others--if other proofs there are--by connecting
speculation with experience; but in itself it rather prepares the mind
for theological cognition, and gives it a right and natural direction,
than establishes a sure foundation for theology.

It is now perfectly evident that transcendental questions admit only
of transcendental answers--those presented a priori by pure
conceptions without the least empirical admixture. But the question
in the present case is evidently synthetical--it aims at the extension
of our cognition beyond the bounds of experience--it requires an
assurance respecting the existence of a being corresponding with the
idea in our minds, to which no experience can ever be adequate. Now
it has been abundantly proved that all a priori synthetical cognition
is possible only as the expression of the formal conditions of a
possible experience; and that the validity of all principles depends
upon their immanence in the field of experience, that is, their
relation to objects of empirical cognition or phenomena. Thus all
transcendental procedure in reference to speculative theology is
without result.

If any one prefers doubting the conclusiveness of the proofs of
our analytic to losing the persuasion of the validity of these old
and time honoured arguments, he at least cannot decline answering the
question--how he can pass the limits of all possible experience by
the help of mere ideas. If he talks of new arguments, or of improvements
upon old arguments, I request him to spare me. There is certainly no
great choice in this sphere of discussion, as all speculative
arguments must at last look for support to the ontological, and I
have, therefore, very little to fear from the argumentative
fecundity of the dogmatical defenders of a non-sensuous reason.
Without looking upon myself as a remarkably combative person, I
shall not decline the challenge to detect the fallacy and destroy
the pretensions of every attempt of speculative theology. And yet
the hope of better fortune never deserts those who are accustomed to
the dogmatical mode of procedure. I shall, therefore, restrict
myself to the simple and equitable demand that such reasoners will
demonstrate, from the nature of the human mind as well as from that
of the other sources of knowledge, how we are to proceed to extend
our cognition completely a priori, and to carry it to that point where
experience abandons us, and no means exist of guaranteeing the
objective reality of our conceptions. In whatever way the
understanding may have attained to a conception, the existence of
the object of the conception cannot be discovered in it by analysis,
because the cognition of the existence of the object depends upon
the object's being posited and given in itself apart from the
conception. But it is utterly impossible to go beyond our
conception, without the aid of experience--which presents to the
mind nothing but phenomena, or to attain by the help of mere
conceptions to a conviction of the existence of new kinds of objects
or supernatural beings.

But although pure speculative reason is far from sufficient to
demonstrate the existence of a Supreme Being, it is of the highest
utility in correcting our conception of this being--on the supposition
that we can attain to the cognition of it by some other means--in
making it consistent with itself and with all other conceptions of
intelligible objects, clearing it from all that is incompatible with
the conception of an ens summun, and eliminating from it all
limitations or admixtures of empirical elements.

Transcendental theology is still therefore, notwithstanding its
objective insufficiency, of importance in a negative respect; it is
useful as a test of the procedure of reason when engaged with pure
ideas, no other than a transcendental standard being in this case
admissible. For if, from a practical point of view, the hypothesis
of a Supreme and All-sufficient Being is to maintain its validity
without opposition, it must be of the highest importance to define
this conception in a correct and rigorous manner--as the
transcendental conception of a necessary being, to eliminate all
phenomenal elements (anthropomorphism in its most extended
signification), and at the same time to overflow all contradictory
assertions--be they atheistic, deistic, or anthropomorphic. This is
of course very easy; as the same arguments which demonstrated the
inability of human reason to affirm the existence of a Supreme Being
must be alike sufficient to prove the invalidity of its denial. For
it is impossible to gain from the pure speculation of reason
demonstration that there exists no Supreme Being, as the ground of
all that exists, or that this being possesses none of those properties
which we regard as analogical with the dynamical qualities of a
thinking being, or that, as the anthropomorphists would have us
believe, it is subject to all the limitations which sensibility
imposes upon those intelligences which exist in the world of
experience.

A Supreme Being is, therefore, for the speculative reason, a mere
ideal, though a faultless one--a conception which perfects and
crowns the system of human cognition, but the objective reality of
which can neither be proved nor disproved by pure reason. If this
defect is ever supplied by a moral theology, the problematic
transcendental theology which has preceded, will have been at least
serviceable as demonstrating the mental necessity existing for the
conception, by the complete determination of it which it has
furnished, and the ceaseless testing of the conclusions of a reason
often deceived by sense, and not always in harmony with its own ideas.
The attributes of necessity, infinitude, unity, existence apart from
the world (and not as a world soul), eternity (free from conditions
of time), omnipresence (free from conditions of space), omnipotence,
and others, are pure transcendental predicates; and thus the
accurate conception of a Supreme Being, which every theology requires,
is furnished by transcendental theology alone.

APPENDIX.

Of the Regulative Employment of the Ideas of Pure Reason.

The result of all the dialectical attempts of pure reason not only
confirms the truth of what we have already proved in our
Transcendental Analytic, namely, that all inferences which would
lead us beyond the limits of experience are fallacious and groundless,
but it at the same time teaches us this important lesson, that human
reason has a natural inclination to overstep these limits, and that
transcendental ideas are as much the natural property of the reason
as categories are of the understanding. There exists this difference,
however, that while the categories never mislead us, outward objects
being always in perfect harmony therewith, ideas are the parents of
irresistible illusions, the severest and most subtle criticism being
required to save us from the fallacies which they induce.

Whatever is grounded in the nature of our powers will be found to be
in harmony with the final purpose and proper employment of these
powers, when once we have discovered their true direction and aim.
We are entitled to suppose, therefore, that there exists a mode of
employing transcendental ideas which is proper and immanent; although,
when we mistake their meaning, and regard them as conceptions of
actual things, their mode of application is transcendent and delusive.
For it is not the idea itself, but only the employment of the idea
in relation to possible experience, that is transcendent or
immanent. An idea is employed transcendently, when it is applied to
an object falsely believed to be adequate with and to correspond to
it; imminently, when it is applied solely to the employment of the
understanding in the sphere of experience. Thus all errors of
subreptio--of misapplication, are to be ascribed to defects of
judgement, and not to understanding or reason.

Reason never has an immediate relation to an object; it relates
immediately to the understanding alone. It is only through the
understanding that it can be employed in the field of experience. It
does not form conceptions of objects, it merely arranges them and
gives to them that unity which they are capable of possessing when
the sphere of their application has been extended as widely as possible.
Reason avails itself of the conception of the understanding for the
sole purpose of producing totality in the different series. This
totality the understanding does not concern itself with; its only
occupation is the connection of experiences, by which series of
conditions in accordance with conceptions are established. The
object of reason is, therefore, the understanding and its proper
destination. As the latter brings unity into the diversity of
objects by means of its conceptions, so the former brings unity into
the diversity of conceptions by means of ideas; as it sets the final
aim of a collective unity to the operations of the understanding,
which without this occupies itself with a distributive unity alone.

I accordingly maintain that transcendental ideas can never be
employed as constitutive ideas, that they cannot be conceptions of
objects, and that, when thus considered, they assume a fallacious
and dialectical character. But, on the other hand, they are capable
of an admirable and indispensably necessary application to objects--as
regulative ideas, directing the understanding to a certain aim, the
guiding lines towards which all its laws follow, and in which they
all meet in one point. This point--though a mere idea (focus imaginarius),
that is, not a point from which the conceptions of the understanding
do really proceed, for it lies beyond the sphere of possible
experience--serves, notwithstanding, to give to these conceptions
the greatest possible unity combined with the greatest possible
extension. Hence arises the natural illusion which induces us to
believe that these lines proceed from an object which lies out of
the sphere of empirical cognition, just as objects reflected in a
mirror appear to be behind it. But this illusion--which we may
hinder from imposing upon us--is necessary and unavoidable, if we
desire to see, not only those objects which lie before us, but those
which are at a great distance behind us; that is to say, when, in
the present case, we direct the aims of the understanding, beyond
every given experience, towards an extension as great as can
possibly be attained.

If we review our cognitions in their entire extent, we shall find
that the peculiar business of reason is to arrange them into a system,
that is to say, to give them connection according to a principle. This
unity presupposes an idea--the idea of the form of a whole (of
cognition), preceding the determinate cognition of the parts, and
containing the conditions which determine a priori to every part its
place and relation to the other parts of the whole system. This
idea, accordingly, demands complete unity in the cognition of the
understanding--not the unity of a contingent aggregate, but that of
a system connected according to necessary laws. It cannot be
affirmed with propriety that this idea is a conception of an object;
it is merely a conception of the complete unity of the conceptions
of objects, in so far as this unity is available to the
understanding as a rule. Such conceptions of reason are not derived
from nature; on the contrary, we employ them for the interrogation
and investigation of nature, and regard our cognition as defective
so long as it is not adequate to them. We admit that such a thing as
pure earth, pure water, or pure air, is not to be discovered. And yet
we require these conceptions (which have their origin in the reason,
so far as regards their absolute purity and completeness) for the purpose
of determining the share which each of these natural causes has in
every phenomenon. Thus the different kinds of matter are all referred
to earths, as mere weight; to salts and inflammable bodies, as pure
force; and finally, to water and air, as the vehicula of the former,
or the machines employed by them in their operations--for the
purpose of explaining the chemical action and reaction of bodies in
accordance with the idea of a mechanism. For, although not actually
so expressed, the influence of such ideas of reason is very observable
in the procedure of natural philosophers.

If reason is the faculty of deducing the particular from the
general, and if the general be certain in se and given, it is only
necessary that the judgement should subsume the particular under the
general, the particular being thus necessarily determined. I shall
term this the demonstrative or apodeictic employment of reason. If,
however, the general is admitted as problematical only, and is a
mere idea, the particular case is certain, but the universality of
the rule which applies to this particular case remains a problem.
Several particular cases, the certainty of which is beyond doubt,
are then taken and examined, for the purpose of discovering whether
the rule is applicable to them; and if it appears that all the
particular cases which can be collected follow from the rule, its
universality is inferred, and at the same time, all the causes which
have not, or cannot be presented to our observation, are concluded
to be of the same character with those which we have observed. This
I shall term the hypothetical employment of the reason.

The hypothetical exercise of reason by the aid of ideas employed
as problematical conceptions is properly not constitutive. That is
to say, if we consider the subject strictly, the truth of the rule,
which has been employed as an hypothesis, does not follow from the
use that is made of it by reason. For how can we know all the possible
cases that may arise? some of which may, however, prove exceptions
to the universality of the rule. This employment of reason is merely
regulative, and its sole aim is the introduction of unity into the
aggregate of our particular cognitions, and thereby the
approximating of the rule to universality.

The object of the hypothetical employment of reason is therefore the
systematic unity of cognitions; and this unity is the criterion of
the truth of a rule. On the other hand, this systematic unity--as a
mere idea--is in fact merely a unity projected, not to be regarded
as given, but only in the light of a problem--a problem which serves,
however, as a principle for the various and particular exercise of
the understanding in experience, directs it with regard to those cases
which are not presented to our observation, and introduces harmony
and consistency into all its operations.

All that we can be certain of from the above considerations is
that this systematic unity is a logical principle, whose aim is to
assist the understanding, where it cannot of itself attain to rules,
by means of ideas, to bring all these various rules under one
principle, and thus to ensure the most complete consistency and
connection that can be attained. But the assertion that objects and
the understanding by which they are cognized are so constituted as
to be determined to systematic unity, that this may be postulated a
priori, without any reference to the interest of reason, and that we
are justified in declaring all possible cognitions--empirical and
others--to possess systematic unity, and to be subject to general
principles from which, notwithstanding their various character, they
are all derivable such an assertion can be founded only upon a
transcendental principle of reason, which would render this systematic
unity not subjectively and logically--in its character of a method,
but objectively necessary.

We shall illustrate this by an example. The conceptions of the
understanding make us acquainted, among many other kinds of unity,
with that of the causality of a substance, which is termed power.
The different phenomenal manifestations of the same substance appear
at first view to be so very dissimilar that we are inclined to
assume the existence of just as many different powers as there are
different effects--as, in the case of the human mind, we have feeling,
consciousness, imagination, memory, wit, analysis, pleasure, desire
and so on. Now we are required by a logical maxim to reduce these
differences to as small a number as possible, by comparing them and
discovering the hidden identity which exists. We must inquire, for
example, whether or not imagination (connected with consciousness),
memory, wit, and analysis are not merely different forms of
understanding and reason. The idea of a fundamental power, the
existence of which no effort of logic can assure us of, is the problem
to be solved, for the systematic representation of the existing
variety of powers. The logical principle of reason requires us to
produce as great a unity as is possible in the system of our
cognitions; and the more the phenomena of this and the other power
are found to be identical, the more probable does it become, that they
are nothing but different manifestations of one and the same power,
which may be called, relatively speaking, a fundamental power. And
so with other cases.

These relatively fundamental powers must again be compared with each
other, to discover, if possible, the one radical and absolutely
fundamental power of which they are but the manifestations. But this
unity is purely hypothetical. It is not maintained, that this unity
does really exist, but that we must, in the interest of reason, that
is, for the establishment of principles for the various rules
presented by experience, try to discover and introduce it, so far as
is practicable, into the sphere of our cognitions.

But the transcendental employment of the understanding would lead us
to believe that this idea of a fundamental power is not problematical,
but that it possesses objective reality, and thus the systematic unity
of the various powers or forces in a substance is demanded by the
understanding and erected into an apodeictic or necessary principle.
For, without having attempted to discover the unity of the various
powers existing in nature, nay, even after all our attempts have
failed, we notwithstanding presuppose that it does exist, and may
be, sooner or later, discovered. And this reason does, not only, as
in the case above adduced, with regard to the unity of substance, but
where many substances, although all to a certain extent homogeneous,
are discoverable, as in the case of matter in general. Here also
does reason presuppose the existence of the systematic unity of
various powers--inasmuch as particular laws of nature are
subordinate to general laws; and parsimony in principles is not merely
an economical principle of reason, but an essential law of nature.

We cannot understand, in fact, how a logical principle of unity
can of right exist, unless we presuppose a transcendental principle,
by which such a systematic unit--as a property of objects
themselves--is regarded as necessary a priori. For with what right
can reason, in its logical exercise, require us to regard the variety
of forces which nature displays, as in effect a disguised unity, and
to deduce them from one fundamental force or power, when she is free
to admit that it is just as possible that all forces should be
different in kind, and that a systematic unity is not conformable to
the design of nature? In this view of the case, reason would be
proceeding in direct opposition to her own destination, by setting
as an aim an idea which entirely conflicts with the procedure and
arrangement of nature. Neither can we assert that reason has
previously inferred this unity from the contingent nature of
phenomena. For the law of reason which requires us to seek for this
unity is a necessary law, inasmuch as without it we should not possess
a faculty of reason, nor without reason a consistent and
self-accordant mode of employing the understanding, nor, in the
absence of this, any proper and sufficient criterion of empirical
truth. In relation to this criterion, therefore, we must suppose the
idea of the systematic unity of nature to possess objective validity
and necessity.

We find this transcendental presupposition lurking in different
forms in the principles of philosophers, although they have neither
recognized it nor confessed to themselves its presence. That the
diversities of individual things do not exclude identity of species,
that the various species must be considered as merely different
determinations of a few genera, and these again as divisions of
still higher races, and so on--that, accordingly, a certain systematic
unity of all possible empirical conceptions, in so far as they can
be deduced from higher and more general conceptions, must be sought
for, is a scholastic maxim or logical principle, without which
reason could not be employed by us. For we can infer the particular
from the general, only in so far as general properties of things
constitute the foundation upon which the particular rest.

That the same unity exists in nature is presupposed by
philosophers in the well-known scholastic maxim, which forbids us
unnecessarily to augment the number of entities or principles (entia
praeter necessitatem non esse multiplicanda). This maxim asserts
that nature herself assists in the establishment of this unity of
reason, and that the seemingly infinite diversity of phenomena
should not deter us from the expectation of discovering beneath this
diversity a unity of fundamental properties, of which the aforesaid
variety is but a more or less determined form. This unity, although
a mere idea, thinkers have found it necessary rather to moderate the
desire than to encourage it. It was considered a great step when
chemists were able to reduce all salts to two main genera--acids and
alkalis; and they regard this difference as itself a mere variety,
or different manifestation of one and the same fundamental material.
The different kinds of earths (stones and even metals) chemists have
endeavoured to reduce to three, and afterwards to two; but still,
not content with this advance, they cannot but think that behind these
diversities there lurks but one genus--nay, that even salts and earths
have a common principle. It might be conjectured that this is merely
an economical plan of reason, for the purpose of sparing itself
trouble, and an attempt of a purely hypothetical character, which,
when successful, gives an appearance of probability to the principle
of explanation employed by the reason. But a selfish purpose of this
kind is easily to be distinguished from the idea, according to which
every one presupposes that this unity is in accordance with the laws
of nature, and that reason does not in this case request, but
requires, although we are quite unable to determine the proper
limits of this unity.

If the diversity existing in phenomena--a diversity not of form (for
in this they may be similar) but of content--were so great that the
subtlest human reason could never by comparison discover in them the
least similarity (which is not impossible), in this case the logical
law of genera would be without foundation, the conception of a
genus, nay, all general conceptions would be impossible, and the
faculty of the understanding, the exercise of which is restricted to
the world of conceptions, could not exist. The logical principle of
genera, accordingly, if it is to be applied to nature (by which I mean
objects presented to our senses), presupposes a transcendental
principle. In accordance with this principle, homogeneity is
necessarily presupposed in the variety of phenomena (although we are
unable to determine a priori the degree of this homogeneity),
because without it no empirical conceptions, and consequently no
experience, would be possible.

The logical principle of genera, which demands identity in
phenomena, is balanced by another principle--that of species, which
requires variety and diversity in things, notwithstanding their
accordance in the same genus, and directs the understanding to
attend to the one no less than to the other. This principle (of the
faculty of distinction) acts as a check upon the reason and reason
exhibits in this respect a double and conflicting interest--on the
one hand, the interest in the extent (the interest of generality) in
relation to genera; on the other, that of the content (the interest
of individuality) in relation to the variety of species. In the former
case, the understanding cogitates more under its conceptions, in the
latter it cogitates more in them. This distinction manifests itself
likewise in the habits of thought peculiar to natural philosophers,
some of whom--the remarkably speculative heads--may be said to be
hostile to heterogeneity in phenomena, and have their eyes always
fixed on the unity of genera, while others--with a strong empirical
tendency--aim unceasingly at the analysis of phenomena, and almost
destroy in us the hope of ever being able to estimate the character
of these according to general principles.

The latter mode of thought is evidently based upon a logical
principle, the aim of which is the systematic completeness of all
cognitions. This principle authorizes me, beginning at the genus, to
descend to the various and diverse contained under it; and in this
way extension, as in the former case unity, is assured to the system.
For if we merely examine the sphere of the conception which
indicates a genus, we cannot discover how far it is possible to
proceed in the division of that sphere; just as it is impossible, from
the consideration of the space occupied by matter, to determine how
far we can proceed in the division of it. Hence every genus must
contain different species, and these again different subspecies; and
as each of the latter must itself contain a sphere (must be of a
certain extent, as a conceptus communis), reason demands that no
species or sub-species is to be considered as the lowest possible.
For a species or sub-species, being always a conception, which contains
only what is common to a number of different things, does not
completely determine any individual thing, or relate immediately to
it, and must consequently contain other conceptions, that is, other
sub-species under it. This law of specification may be thus expressed:
entium varietates non temere sunt minuendae.

But it is easy to see that this logical law would likewise be
without sense or application, were it not based upon a
transcendental law of specification, which certainly does not
require that the differences existing phenomena should be infinite
in number, for the logical principle, which merely maintains the
indeterminateness of the logical sphere of a conception, in relation
to its possible division, does not authorize this statement; while
it does impose upon the understanding the duty of searching for
subspecies to every species, and minor differences in every
difference. For, were there no lower conceptions, neither could
there be any higher. Now the understanding cognizes only by means of
conceptions; consequently, how far soever it may proceed in
division, never by mere intuition, but always by lower and lower
conceptions. The cognition of phenomena in their complete
determination (which is possible only by means of the understanding)
requires an unceasingly continued specification of conceptions, and
a progression to ever smaller differences, of which abstraction bad
been made in the conception of the species, and still more in that
of the genus.

This law of specification cannot be deduced from experience; it
can never present us with a principle of so universal an
application. Empirical specification very soon stops in its
distinction of diversities, and requires the guidance of the
transcendental law, as a principle of the reason--a law which
imposes on us the necessity of never ceasing in our search for
differences, even although these may not present themselves to the
senses. That absorbent earths are of different kinds could only be
discovered by obeying the anticipatory law of reason, which imposes
upon the understanding the task of discovering the differences
existing between these earths, and supposes that nature is richer in
substances than our senses would indicate. The faculty of the
understanding belongs to us just as much under the presupposition of
differences in the objects of nature, as under the condition that
these objects are homogeneous, because we could not possess
conceptions, nor make any use of our understanding, were not the
phenomena included under these conceptions in some respects
dissimilar, as well as similar, in their character.

Reason thus prepares the sphere of the understanding for the
operations of this faculty: 1. By the principle of the homogeneity
of the diverse in higher genera; 2. By the principle of the variety
of the homogeneous in lower species; and, to complete the systematic
unity, it adds, 3. A law of the affinity of all conceptions which
prescribes a continuous transition from one species to every other
by the gradual increase of diversity. We may term these the principles
of the homogeneity, the specification, and the continuity of forms.
The latter results from the union of the two former, inasmuch as we
regard the systematic connection as complete in thought, in the ascent
to higher genera, as well as in the descent to lower species. For
all diversities must be related to each other, as they all spring from
one highest genus, descending through the different gradations of a
more and more extended determination.

We may illustrate the systematic unity produced by the three logical
principles in the following manner. Every conception may be regarded
as a point, which, as the standpoint of a spectator, has a certain
horizon, which may be said to enclose a number of things that may be
viewed, so to speak, from that centre. Within this horizon there
must be an infinite number of other points, each of which has its
own horizon, smaller and more circumscribed; in other words, every
species contains sub-species, according to the principle of
specification, and the logical horizon consists of smaller horizons
(subspecies), but not of points (individuals), which possess no
extent. But different horizons or genera, which include under them
so many conceptions, may have one common horizon, from which, as
from a mid-point, they may be surveyed; and we may proceed thus,
till we arrive at the highest genus, or universal and true horizon,
which is determined by the highest conception, and which contains
under itself all differences and varieties, as genera, species, and
subspecies.

To this highest standpoint I am conducted by the law of homogeneity,
as to all lower and more variously-determined conceptions by the law
of specification. Now as in this way there exists no void in the whole
extent of all possible conceptions, and as out of the sphere of
these the mind can discover nothing, there arises from the
presupposition of the universal horizon above mentioned, and its
complete division, the principle: Non datur vacuum formarum. This
principle asserts that there are not different primitive and highest
genera, which stand isolated, so to speak, from each other, but all
the various genera are mere divisions and limitations of one highest
and universal genus; and hence follows immediately the principle:
Datur continuum formarum. This principle indicates that all
differences of species limit each other, and do not admit of
transition from one to another by a saltus, but only through smaller
degrees of the difference between the one species and the other. In
one word, there are no species or sub-species which (in the view of
reason) are the nearest possible to each other; intermediate species
or sub-species being always possible, the difference of which from
each of the former is always smaller than the difference existing
between these.

The first law, therefore, directs us to avoid the notion that
there exist different primal genera, and enounces the fact of
perfect homogeneity; the second imposes a check upon this tendency
to unity and prescribes the distinction of sub-species, before
proceeding to apply our general conceptions to individuals. The
third unites both the former, by enouncing the fact of homogeneity
as existing even in the most various diversity, by means of the
gradual transition from one species to another. Thus it indicates a
relationship between the different branches or species, in so far as
they all spring from the same stem.

But this logical law of the continuum specierum (formarum logicarum)
presupposes a transcendental principle (lex continui in natura),
without which the understanding might be led into error, by
following the guidance of the former, and thus perhaps pursuing a path
contrary to that prescribed by nature. This law must, consequently,
be based upon pure transcendental, and not upon empirical,
considerations. For, in the latter case, it would come later than
the system; whereas it is really itself the parent of all that is
systematic in our cognition of nature. These principles are not mere
hypotheses employed for the purpose of experimenting upon nature;
although when any such connection is discovered, it forms a solid
ground for regarding the hypothetical unity as valid in the sphere
of nature--and thus they are in this respect not without their use.
But we go farther, and maintain that it is manifest that these
principles of parsimony in fundamental causes, variety in effects,
and affinity in phenomena, are in accordance both with reason and
nature, and that they are not mere methods or plans devised for the
purpose of assisting us in our observation of the external world.

But it is plain that this continuity of forms is a mere idea, to
which no adequate object can be discovered in experience. And this
for two reasons. First, because the species in nature are really
divided, and hence form quanta discreta; and, if the gradual
progression through their affinity were continuous, the intermediate
members lying between two given species must be infinite in number,
which is impossible. Secondly, because we cannot make any
determinate empirical use of this law, inasmuch as it does not present
us with any criterion of affinity which could aid us in determining
how far we ought to pursue the graduation of differences: it merely
contains a general indication that it is our duty to seek for and,
if possible, to discover them.

When we arrange these principles of systematic unity in the order
conformable to their employment in experience, they will stand thus:
Variety, Affinity, Unity, each of them, as ideas, being taken in the
highest degree of their completeness. Reason presupposes the existence
of cognitions of the understanding, which have a direct relation to
experience, and aims at the ideal unity of these cognitions--a unity
which far transcends all experience or empirical notions. The affinity
of the diverse, notwithstanding the differences existing between its
parts, has a relation to things, but a still closer one to the mere
properties and powers of things. For example, imperfect experience
may represent the orbits of the planets as circular. But we discover
variations from this course, and we proceed to suppose that the
planets revolve in a path which, if not a circle, is of a character
very similar to it. That is to say, the movements of those planets
which do not form a circle will approximate more or less to the
properties of a circle, and probably form an ellipse. The paths of
comets exhibit still greater variations, for, so far as our
observation extends, they do not return upon their own course in a
circle or ellipse. But we proceed to the conjecture that comets
describe a parabola, a figure which is closely allied to the
ellipse. In fact, a parabola is merely an ellipse, with its longer
axis produced to an indefinite extent. Thus these principles conduct
us to a unity in the genera of the forms of these orbits, and,
proceeding farther, to a unity as regards the cause of the motions
of the heavenly bodies--that is, gravitation. But we go on extending
our conquests over nature, and endeavour to explain all seeming
deviations from these rules, and even make additions to our system
which no experience can ever substantiate--for example, the theory,
in affinity with that of ellipses, of hyperbolic paths of comets,
pursuing which, these bodies leave our solar system and, passing
from sun to sun, unite the most distant parts of the infinite
universe, which is held together by the same moving power.

The most remarkable circumstance connected with these principles
is that they seem to be transcendental, and, although only
containing ideas for the guidance of the empirical exercise of reason,
and although this empirical employment stands to these ideas in an
asymptotic relation alone (to use a mathematical term), that is,
continually approximate, without ever being able to attain to them,
they possess, notwithstanding, as a priori synthetical propositions,
objective though undetermined validity, and are available as rules
for possible experience. In the elaboration of our experience, they
may also be employed with great advantage, as heuristic [Footnote:
From the Greek, eurhioko.] principles. A transcendental deduction of
them cannot be made; such a deduction being always impossible in the
case of ideas, as has been already shown.

We distinguished, in the Transcendental Analytic, the dynamical
principles of the understanding, which are regulative principles of
intuition, from the mathematical, which are constitutive principles
of intuition. These dynamical laws are, however, constitutive in relation
to experience, inasmuch as they render the conceptions without which
experience could not exist possible a priori. But the principles of
pure reason cannot be constitutive even in regard to empirical
conceptions, because no sensuous schema corresponding to them can be
discovered, and they cannot therefore have an object in concreto. Now,
if I grant that they cannot be employed in the sphere of experience,
as constitutive principles, how shall I secure for them employment
and objective validity as regulative principles, and in what way can
they be so employed?

The understanding is the object of reason, as sensibility is the
object of the understanding. The production of systematic unity in
all the empirical operations of the understanding is the proper occupation
of reason; just as it is the business of the understanding to
connect the various content of phenomena by means of conceptions,
and subject them to empirical laws. But the operations of the
understanding are, without the schemata of sensibility,
undetermined; and, in the same manner, the unity of reason is
perfectly undetermined as regards the conditions under which, and
the extent to which, the understanding ought to carry the systematic
connection of its conceptions. But, although it is impossible to
discover in intuition a schema for the complete systematic unity of
all the conceptions of the understanding, there must be some
analogon of this schema. This analogon is the idea of the maximum of
the division and the connection of our cognition in one principle.
For we may have a determinate notion of a maximum and an absolutely
perfect, all the restrictive conditions which are connected with an
indeterminate and various content having been abstracted. Thus the
idea of reason is analogous with a sensuous schema, with this
difference, that the application of the categories to the schema of
reason does not present a cognition of any object (as is the case with
the application of the categories to sensuous schemata), but merely
provides us with a rule or principle for the systematic unity of the
exercise of the understanding. Now, as every principle which imposes
upon the exercise of the understanding a priori compliance with the
rule of systematic unity also relates, although only in an indirect
manner, to an object of experience, the principles of pure reason will
also possess objective reality and validity in relation to experience.
But they will not aim at determining our knowledge in regard to any
empirical object; they will merely indicate the procedure, following
which the empirical and determinate exercise of the understanding
may be in complete harmony and connection with itself--a result
which is produced by its being brought into harmony with the principle
of systematic unity, so far as that is possible, and deduced from it.

I term all subjective principles, which are not derived from
observation of the constitution of an object, but from the interest
which Reason has in producing a certain completeness in her
cognition of that object, maxims of reason. Thus there are maxims of
speculative reason, which are based solely upon its speculative
interest, although they appear to be objective principles.

When principles which are really regulative are regarded as
constitutive, and employed as objective principles, contradictions
must arise; but if they are considered as mere maxims, there is no
room for contradictions of any kind, as they then merely indicate
the different interests of reason, which occasion differences in the
mode of thought. In effect, Reason has only one single interest, and
the seeming contradiction existing between her maxims merely indicates
a difference in, and a reciprocal limitation of, the methods by
which this interest is satisfied.

This reasoner has at heart the interest of diversity--in
accordance with the principle of specification; another, the
interest of unity--in accordance with the principle of aggregation.
Each believes that his judgement rests upon a thorough insight into
the subject he is examining, and yet it has been influenced solely
by a greater or less degree of adherence to some one of the two
principles, neither of which are objective, but originate solely
from the interest of reason, and on this account to be termed maxims
rather than principles. When I observe intelligent men disputing about
the distinctive characteristics of men, animals, or plants, and even
of minerals, those on the one side assuming the existence of certain
national characteristics, certain well-defined and hereditary
distinctions of family, race, and so on, while the other side maintain
that nature has endowed all races of men with the same faculties and
dispositions, and that all differences are but the result of
external and accidental circumstances--I have only to consider for
a moment the real nature of the subject of discussion, to arrive at
the conclusion that it is a subject far too deep for us to judge of,
and that there is little probability of either party being able to
speak from a perfect insight into and understanding of the nature of
the subject itself. Both have, in reality, been struggling for the
twofold interest of reason; the one maintaining the one interest,
the other the other. But this difference between the maxims of
diversity and unity may easily be reconciled and adjusted; although,
so long as they are regarded as objective principles, they must
occasion not only contradictions and polemic, but place hinderances
in the way of the advancement of truth, until some means is discovered
of reconciling these conflicting interests, and bringing reason into
union and harmony with itself.

The same is the case with the so-called law discovered by Leibnitz, and
supported with remarkable ability by Bonnet--the law of the continuous
gradation of created beings, which is nothing more than an inference
from the principle of affinity; for observation and study of the order
of nature could never present it to the mind as an objective truth. The
steps of this ladder, as they appear in experience, are too far apart
from each other, and the so-called petty differences between different
kinds of animals are in nature commonly so wide separations that no
confidence can be placed in such views (particularly when we reflect on
the great variety of things, and the ease with which we can discover
resemblances), and no faith in the laws which are said to express the
aims and purposes of nature. On the other hand, the method of
investigating the order of nature in the light of this principle, and
the maxim which requires us to regard this order--it being still
undetermined how far it extends--as really existing in nature, is
beyond doubt a legitimate and excellent principle of reason--a
principle which extends farther than any experience or observation of
ours and which, without giving us any positive knowledge of anything in
the region of experience, guides us to the goal of systematic unity.

Of the Ultimate End of the Natural Dialectic of Human Reason.

The ideas of pure reason cannot be, of themselves and in their own
nature, dialectical; it is from their misemployment alone that
fallacies and illusions arise. For they originate in the nature of
reason itself, and it is impossible that this supreme tribunal for
all the rights and claims of speculation should be itself undeserving
of confidence and promotive of error. It is to be expected, therefore,
that these ideas have a genuine and legitimate aim. It is true, the
mob of sophists raise against reason the cry of inconsistency and
contradiction, and affect to despise the government of that faculty,
because they cannot understand its constitution, while it is to its
beneficial influences alone that they owe the position and the
intelligence which enable them to criticize and to blame its
procedure.

We cannot employ an a priori conception with certainty, until we
have made a transcendental deduction therefore. The ideas of pure
reason do not admit of the same kind of deduction as the categories.
But if they are to possess the least objective validity, and to
represent anything but mere creations of thought (entia rationis
ratiocinantis), a deduction of them must be possible. This deduction
will complete the critical task imposed upon pure reason; and it is
to this part Of our labours that we now proceed.

There is a great difference between a thing's being presented to the
mind as an object in an absolute sense, or merely as an ideal
object. In the former case I employ my conceptions to determine the
object; in the latter case nothing is present to the mind but a mere
schema, which does not relate directly to an object, not even in a
hypothetical sense, but which is useful only for the purpose of
representing other objects to the mind, in a mediate and indirect
manner, by means of their relation to the idea in the intellect.
Thus I say the conception of a supreme intelligence is a mere idea;
that is to say, its objective reality does not consist in the fact
that it has an immediate relation to an object (for in this sense we
have no means of establishing its objective validity), it is merely
a schema constructed according to the necessary conditions of the
unity of reason--the schema of a thing in general, which is useful
towards the production of the highest degree of systematic unity in
the empirical exercise of reason, in which we deduce this or that
object of experience from the imaginary object of this idea, as the
ground or cause of the said object of experience. In this way, the
idea is properly a heuristic, and not an ostensive, conception; it
does not give us any information respecting the constitution of an
object, it merely indicates how, under the guidance of the idea, we
ought to investigate the constitution and the relations of objects
in the world of experience. Now, if it can be shown that the three
kinds of transcendental ideas (psychological, cosmological, and
theological), although not relating directly to any object nor
determining it, do nevertheless, on the supposition of the existence
of an ideal object, produce systematic unity in the laws of the
empirical employment of the reason, and extend our empirical
cognition, without ever being inconsistent or in opposition with it-
it must be a necessary maxim of reason to regulate its procedure
according to these ideas. And this forms the transcendental
deduction of all speculative ideas, not as constitutive principles
of the extension of our cognition beyond the limits of our experience,
but as regulative principles of the systematic unity of empirical
cognition, which is by the aid of these ideas arranged and emended
within its own proper limits, to an extent unattainable by the
operation of the principles of the understanding alone.

I shall make this plainer. Guided by the principles involved in
these ideas, we must, in the first place, so connect all the
phenomena, actions, and feelings of the mind, as if it were a simple
substance, which, endowed with personal identity, possesses a
permanent existence (in this life at least), while its states, among
which those of the body are to be included as external conditions,
are in continual change. Secondly, in cosmology, we must investigate
the conditions of all natural phenomena, internal as well as external,
as if they belonged to a chain infinite and without any prime or
supreme member, while we do not, on this account, deny the existence
of intelligible grounds of these phenomena, although we never employ
them to explain phenomena, for the simple reason that they are not
objects of our cognition. Thirdly, in the sphere of theology, we
must regard the whole system of possible experience as forming an
absolute, but dependent and sensuously-conditioned unity, and at the
same time as based upon a sole, supreme, and all-sufficient ground
existing apart from the world itself--a ground which is a
self-subsistent, primeval and creative reason, in relation to which
we so employ our reason in the field of experience, as if all objects
drew their origin from that archetype of all reason. In other words,
we ought not to deduce the internal phenomena of the mind from a
simple thinking substance, but deduce them from each other under the
guidance of the regulative idea of a simple being; we ought not to
deduce the phenomena, order, and unity of the universe from a
supreme intelligence, but merely draw from this idea of a supremely
wise cause the rules which must guide reason in its connection of
causes and effects.

Now there is nothing to hinder us from admitting these ideas to
possess an objective and hyperbolic existence, except the cosmological
ideas, which lead reason into an antinomy: the psychological and
theological ideas are not antinomial. They contain no contradiction;
and how, then, can any one dispute their objective reality, since he
who denies it knows as little about their possibility as we who
affirm? And yet, when we wish to admit the existence of a thing, it
is not sufficient to convince ourselves that there is no positive
obstacle in the way; for it cannot be allowable to regard mere
creations of thought, which transcend, though they do not
contradict, all our conceptions, as real and determinate objects,
solely upon the authority of a speculative reason striving to
compass its own aims. They cannot, therefore, be admitted to be real
in themselves; they can only possess a comparative reality--that of
a schema of the regulative principle of the systematic unity of all
cognition. They are to be regarded not as actual things, but as in
some measure analogous to them. We abstract from the object of the
idea all the conditions which limit the exercise of our understanding,
but which, on the other hand, are the sole conditions of our
possessing a determinate conception of any given thing. And thus we
cogitate a something, of the real nature of which we have not the
least conception, but which we represent to ourselves as standing in
a relation to the whole system of phenomena, analogous to that in
which phenomena stand to each other.

By admitting these ideal beings, we do not really extend our
cognitions beyond the objects of possible experience; we extend merely
the empirical unity of our experience, by the aid of systematic unity,
the schema of which is furnished by the idea, which is therefore
valid--not as a constitutive, but as a regulative principle. For
although we posit a thing corresponding to the idea--a something, an
actual existence--we do not on that account aim at the extension of
our cognition by means of transcendent conceptions. This existence
is purely ideal, and not objective; it is the mere expression of the
systematic unity which is to be the guide of reason in the field of
experience. There are no attempts made at deciding what the ground
of this unity may be, or what the real nature of this imaginary being.

Thus the transcendental and only determinate conception of God,
which is presented to us by speculative reason, is in the strictest
sense deistic. In other words, reason does not assure us of the
objective validity of the conception; it merely gives us the idea of
something, on which the supreme and necessary unity of all
experience is based. This something we cannot, following the analogy
of a real substance, cogitate otherwise than as the cause of all
things operating in accordance with rational laws, if we regard it
as an individual object; although we should rest contented with the
idea alone as a regulative principle of reason, and make no attempt
at completing the sum of the conditions imposed by thought. This
attempt is, indeed, inconsistent with the grand aim of complete
systematic unity in the sphere of cognition--a unity to which no
bounds are set by reason.

Hence it happens that, admitting a divine being, I can have no
conception of the internal possibility of its perfection, or of the
necessity of its existence. The only advantage of this admission is
that it enables me to answer all other questions relating to the
contingent, and to give reason the most complete satisfaction as
regards the unity which it aims at attaining in the world of
experience. But I cannot satisfy reason with regard to this hypothesis
itself; and this proves that it is not its intelligence and insight
into the subject, but its speculative interest alone which induces
it to proceed from a point lying far beyond the sphere of our
cognition, for the purpose of being able to consider all objects as
parts of a systematic whole.

Here a distinction presents itself, in regard to the way in which we
may cogitate a presupposition--a distinction which is somewhat subtle,
but of great importance in transcendental philosophy. I may have
sufficient grounds to admit something, or the existence of
something, in a relative point of view (suppositio relativa),
without being justified in admitting it in an absolute sense
(suppositio absoluta). This distinction is undoubtedly requisite, in
the case of a regulative principle, the necessity of which we
recognize, though we are ignorant of the source and cause of that
necessity, and which we assume to be based upon some ultimate
ground, for the purpose of being able to cogitate the universality
of the principle in a more determinate way. For example, I cogitate
the existence of a being corresponding to a pure transcendental
idea. But I cannot admit that this being exists absolutely and in
itself, because all of the conceptions by which I can cogitate an
object in a determinate manner fall short of assuring me of its
existence; nay, the conditions of the objective validity of my
conceptions are excluded by the idea--by the very fact of its being
an idea. The conceptions of reality, substance, causality, nay, even
that of necessity in existence, have no significance out of the sphere
of empirical cognition, and cannot, beyond that sphere, determine any
object. They may, accordingly, be employed to explain the
possibility of things in the world of sense, but they are utterly
inadequate to explain the possibility of the universe itself
considered as a whole; because in this case the ground of
explanation must lie out of and beyond the world, and cannot,
therefore, be an object of possible experience. Now, I may admit the
existence of an incomprehensible being of this nature--the object of
a mere idea, relatively to the world of sense; although I have no ground
to admit its existence absolutely and in itself. For if an idea
(that of a systematic and complete unity, of which I shall presently
speak more particularly) lies at the foundation of the most extended
empirical employment of reason, and if this idea cannot be
adequately represented in concreto, although it is indispensably
necessary for the approximation of empirical unity to the highest
possible degree--I am not only authorized, but compelled, to realize
this idea, that is, to posit a real object corresponding thereto.
But I cannot profess to know this object; it is to me merely a
something, to which, as the ground of systematic unity in cognition,
I attribute such properties as are analogous to the conceptions employed
by the understanding in the sphere of experience. Following the
analogy of the notions of reality, substance, causality, and
necessity, I cogitate a being, which possesses all these attributes
in the highest degree; and, as this idea is the offspring of my reason
alone, I cogitate this being as self-subsistent reason, and as the
cause of the universe operating by means of ideas of the greatest
possible harmony and unity. Thus I abstract all conditions that
would limit my idea, solely for the purpose of rendering systematic
unity possible in the world of empirical diversity, and thus
securing the widest possible extension for the exercise of reason in
that sphere. This I am enabled to do, by regarding all connections
and relations in the world of sense, as if they were the dispositions
of a supreme reason, of which our reason is but a faint image. I then
proceed to cogitate this Supreme Being by conceptions which have,
properly, no meaning or application, except in the world of sense.
But as I am authorized to employ the transcendental hypothesis of such
a being in a relative respect alone, that is, as the substratum of
the greatest possible unity in experience--I may attribute to a being
which I regard as distinct from the world, such properties as belong
solely to the sphere of sense and experience. For I do not desire,
and am not justified in desiring, to cognize this object of my idea,
as it exists in itself; for I possess no conceptions sufficient for
or task, those of reality, substance, causality, nay, even that of
necessity in existence, losing all significance, and becoming merely
the signs of conceptions, without content and without applicability,
when I attempt to carry them beyond the limits of the world of sense.
I cogitate merely the relation of a perfectly unknown being to the
greatest possible systematic unity of experience, solely for the purpose
of employing it as the schema of the regulative principle which directs
reason in its empirical exercise.

It is evident, at the first view, that we cannot presuppose the
reality of this transcendental object, by means of the conceptions
of reality, substance, causality, and so on, because these conceptions
cannot be applied to anything that is distinct from the world of
sense. Thus the supposition of a Supreme Being or cause is purely
relative; it is cogitated only in behalf of the systematic unity of
experience; such a being is but a something, of whose existence in
itself we have not the least conception. Thus, too, it becomes
sufficiently manifest why we required the idea of a necessary being
in relation to objects given by sense, although we can never have the
least conception of this being, or of its absolute necessity.

And now we can clearly perceive the result of our transcendental
dialectic, and the proper aim of the ideas of pure reason--which
become dialectical solely from misunderstanding and inconsiderateness.
Pure reason is, in fact, occupied with itself, and not with any
object. Objects are not presented to it to be embraced in the unity
of an empirical conception; it is only the cognitions of the
understanding that are presented to it, for the purpose of receiving
the unity of a rational conception, that is, of being connected
according to a principle. The unity of reason is the unity of
system; and this systematic unity is not an objective principle,
extending its dominion over objects, but a subjective maxim, extending
its authority over the empirical cognition of objects. The
systematic connection which reason gives to the empirical employment
of the understanding not only advances the extension of that
employment, but ensures its correctness, and thus the principle of
a systematic unity of this nature is also objective, although only
in an indefinite respect (principium vagum). It is not, however, a
constitutive principle, determining an object to which it directly
relates; it is merely a regulative principle or maxim, advancing and
strengthening the empirical exercise of reason, by the opening up of
new paths of which the understanding is ignorant, while it never
conflicts with the laws of its exercise in the sphere of experience.

But reason cannot cogitate this systematic unity, without at the
same time cogitating an object of the idea--an object that cannot be
presented in any experience, which contains no concrete example of
a complete systematic unity. This being (ens rationis ratiocinatae)
is therefore a mere idea and is not assumed to be a thing which is
real absolutely and in itself. On the contrary, it forms merely the
problematical foundation of the connection which the mind introduces
among the phenomena of the sensuous world. We look upon this
connection, in the light of the above-mentioned idea, as if it drew
its origin from the supposed being which corresponds to the idea.
And yet all we aim at is the possession of this idea as a secure
foundation for the systematic unity of experience--a unity
indispensable to reason, advantageous to the understanding, and
promotive of the interests of empirical cognition.

We mistake the true meaning of this idea when we regard it as an
enouncement, or even as a hypothetical declaration of the existence
of a real thing, which we are to regard as the origin or ground of
a systematic constitution of the universe. On the contrary, it is left
completely undetermined what the nature or properties of this
so-called ground may be. The idea is merely to be adopted as a point
of view, from which this unity, so essential to reason and so
beneficial to the understanding, may be regarded as radiating. In
one word, this transcendental thing is merely the schema of a
regulative principle, by means of which Reason, so far as in her lies,
extends the dominion of systematic unity over the whole sphere of
experience.

The first object of an idea of this kind is the ego, considered
merely as a thinking nature or soul. If I wish to investigate the
properties of a thinking being, I must interrogate experience. But
I find that I can apply none of the categories to this object, the
schema of these categories, which is the condition of their
application, being given only in sensuous intuition. But I cannot thus
attain to the cognition of a systematic unity of all the phenomena
of the internal sense. Instead, therefore, of an empirical
conception of what the soul really is, reason takes the conception
of the empirical unity of all thought, and, by cogitating this unity
as unconditioned and primitive, constructs the rational conception
or idea of a simple substance which is in itself unchangeable,
possessing personal identity, and in connection with other real things
external to it; in one word, it constructs the idea of a simple
self-subsistent intelligence. But the real aim of reason in this
procedure is the attainment of principles of systematic unity for
the explanation of the phenomena of the soul. That is, reason
desires to be able to represent all the determinations of the internal
sense as existing in one subject, all powers as deduced from one
fundamental power, all changes as mere varieties in the condition of
a being which is permanent and always the same, and all phenomena in
space as entirely different in their nature from the procedure of
thought. Essential simplicity (with the other attributes predicated
of the ego) is regarded as the mere schema of this regulative
principle; it is not assumed that it is the actual ground of the
properties of the soul. For these properties may rest upon quite
different grounds, of which we are completely ignorant; just as the
above predicates could not give us any knowledge of the soul as it
is in itself, even if we regarded them as valid in respect of it,
inasmuch as they constitute a mere idea, which cannot be represented
in concreto. Nothing but good can result from a psychological idea
of this kind, if we only take proper care not to consider it as more
than an idea; that is, if we regard it as valid merely in relation
to the employment of reason, in the sphere of the phenomena of the
soul. Under the guidance of this idea, or principle, no empirical laws
of corporeal phenomena are called in to explain that which is a
phenomenon of the internal sense alone; no windy hypotheses of the
generation, annihilation, and palingenesis of souls are admitted. Thus
the consideration of this object of the internal sense is kept pure,
and unmixed with heterogeneous elements; while the investigation of
reason aims at reducing all the grounds of explanation employed in
this sphere of knowledge to a single principle. All this is best
effected, nay, cannot be effected otherwise than by means of such a
schema, which requires us to regard this ideal thing as an actual
existence. The psychological idea is, therefore, meaningless and
inapplicable, except as the schema of a regulative conception. For,
if I ask whether the soul is not really of a spiritual nature--it is
a question which has no meaning. From such a conception has been
abstracted, not merely all corporeal nature, but all nature, that
is, all the predicates of a possible experience; and consequently,
all the conditions which enable us to cogitate an object to this
conception have disappeared. But, if these conditions are absent, it
is evident that the conception is meaningless.

The second regulative idea of speculative reason is the conception
of the universe. For nature is properly the only object presented to
us, in regard to which reason requires regulative principles. Nature
is twofold--thinking and corporeal nature. To cogitate the latter in
regard to its internal possibility, that is, to determine the
application of the categories to it, no idea is required--no
representation which transcends experience. In this sphere, therefore,
an idea is impossible, sensuous intuition being our only guide; while,
in the sphere of psychology, we require the fundamental idea (I),
which contains a priori a certain form of thought namely, the unity
of the ego. Pure reason has, therefore, nothing left but nature in
general, and the completeness of conditions in nature in accordance
with some principle. The absolute totality of the series of these
conditions is an idea, which can never be fully realized in the
empirical exercise of reason, while it is serviceable as a rule for
the procedure of reason in relation to that totality. It requires
us, in the explanation of given phenomena (in the regress or ascent
in the series), to proceed as if the series were infinite in itself,
that is, were prolonged in indefinitum,; while on the other hand, where
reason is regarded as itself the determining cause (in the region of
freedom), we are required to proceed as if we had not before us an
object of sense, but of the pure understanding. In this latter case,
the conditions do not exist in the series of phenomena, but may be
placed quite out of and beyond it, and the series of conditions may
be regarded as if it had an absolute beginning from an intelligible
cause. All this proves that the cosmological ideas are nothing but
regulative principles, and not constitutive; and that their aim is
not to realize an actual totality in such series. The full discussion
of this subject will be found in its proper place in the chapter on
the antinomy of pure reason.

The third idea of pure reason, containing the hypothesis of a
being which is valid merely as a relative hypothesis, is that of the
one and all-sufficient cause of all cosmological series, in other
words, the idea of God. We have not the slightest ground absolutely
to admit the existence of an object corresponding to this idea; for
what can empower or authorize us to affirm the existence of a being
of the highest perfection--a being whose existence is absolutely
necessary--merely because we possess the conception of such a being?
The answer is: It is the existence of the world which renders this
hypothesis necessary. But this answer makes it perfectly evident
that the idea of this being, like all other speculative ideas, is
essentially nothing more than a demand upon reason that it shall
regulate the connection which it and its subordinate faculties
introduce into the phenomena of the world by principles of
systematic unity and, consequently, that it shall regard all phenomena
as originating from one all-embracing being, as the supreme and
all-sufficient cause. From this it is plain that the only aim of
reason in this procedure is the establishment of its own formal rule
for the extension of its dominion in the world of experience; that
it does not aim at an extension of its cognition beyond the limits
of experience; and that, consequently, this idea does not contain
any constitutive principle.

The highest formal unity, which is based upon ideas alone, is the
unity of all things--a unity in accordance with an aim or purpose;
and the speculative interest of reason renders it necessary to regard
all order in the world as if it originated from the intention and
design of a supreme reason. This principle unfolds to the view of
reason in the sphere of experience new and enlarged prospects, and
invites it to connect the phenomena of the world according to
teleological laws, and in this way to attain to the highest possible
degree of systematic unity. The hypothesis of a supreme
intelligence, as the sole cause of the universe--an intelligence which
has for us no more than an ideal existence--is accordingly always of
the greatest service to reason. Thus, if we presuppose, in relation
to the figure of the earth (which is round, but somewhat flattened
at the poles),* or that of mountains or seas, wise designs on the part
of an author of the universe, we cannot fail to make, by the light
of this supposition, a great number of interesting discoveries. If
we keep to this hypothesis, as a principle which is purely regulative,
even error cannot be very detrimental. For, in this case, error can
have no more serious consequences than that, where we expected to
discover a teleological connection (nexus finalis), only a
mechanical or physical connection appears. In such a case, we merely
fail to find the additional form of unity we expected, but we do not
lose the rational unity which the mind requires in its procedure in
experience. But even a miscarriage of this sort cannot affect the
law in its general and teleological relations. For although we may
convict an anatomist of an error, when he connects the limb of some
animal with a certain purpose, it is quite impossible to prove in a
single case that any arrangement of nature, be it what it may, is
entirely without aim or design. And thus medical physiology, by the
aid of a principle presented to it by pure reason, extends its very
limited empirical knowledge of the purposes of the different parts
of an organized body so far that it may be asserted with the utmost
confidence, and with the approbation of all reflecting men, that every
organ or bodily part of an animal has its use and answers a certain
design. Now, this is a supposition which, if regarded as of a
constitutive character, goes much farther than any experience or
observation of ours can justify. Hence it is evident that it is
nothing more than a regulative principle of reason, which aims at
the highest degree of systematic unity, by the aid of the idea of a
causality according to design in a supreme cause--a cause which it
regards as the highest intelligence.

[*Footnote: The advantages which a circular form, in the case of the
earth, has over every other, are well known. But few are aware that
the slight flattening at the poles, which gives it the figure of a
spheroid, is the only cause which prevents the elevations of continents
or even of mountains, perhaps thrown up by some internal convulsion,
from continually altering the position of the axis of the earth--and
that to some considerable degree in a short time. The great protuberance
of the earth under the Equator serves to overbalance the impetus of
all other masses of earth, and thus to preserve the axis of the earth,
so far as we can observe, in its present position. And yet this wise
arrangement has been unthinkingly explained from the equilibrium of
the formerly fluid mass.]

If, however, we neglect this restriction of the idea to a purely
regulative influence, reason is betrayed into numerous errors. For
it has then left the ground of experience, in which alone are to be
found the criteria of truth, and has ventured into the region of the
incomprehensible and unsearchable, on the heights of which it loses
its power and collectedness, because it has completely severed its
connection with experience.

The first error which arises from our employing the idea of a
Supreme Being as a constitutive (in repugnance to the very nature of
an idea), and not as a regulative principle, is the error of
inactive reason (ignava ratio).* We may so term every principle
which requires us to regard our investigations of nature as absolutely
complete, and allows reason to cease its inquiries, as if it had fully
executed its task. Thus the psychological idea of the ego, when
employed as a constitutive principle for the explanation of the
phenomena of the soul, and for the extension of our knowledge
regarding this subject beyond the limits of experience--even to the
condition of the soul after death--is convenient enough for the
purposes of pure reason, but detrimental and even ruinous to its
interests in the sphere of nature and experience. The dogmatizing
spiritualist explains the unchanging unity of our personality
through all changes of condition from the unity of a thinking
substance, the interest which we take in things and events that can
happen only after our death, from a consciousness of the immaterial
nature of our thinking subject, and so on. Thus he dispenses with
all empirical investigations into the cause of these internal
phenomena, and with all possible explanations of them upon purely
natural grounds; while, at the dictation of a transcendent reason,
he passes by the immanent sources of cognition in experience,
greatly to his own ease and convenience, but to the sacrifice of
all, genuine insight and intelligence. These prejudicial
consequences become still more evident, in the case of the
dogmatical treatment of our idea of a Supreme Intelligence, and the
theological system of nature (physico-theology) which is falsely based
upon it. For, in this case, the aims which we observe in nature, and
often those which we merely fancy to exist, make the investigation
of causes a very easy task, by directing us to refer such and such
phenomena immediately to the unsearchable will and counsel of the
Supreme Wisdom, while we ought to investigate their causes in the
general laws of the mechanism of matter. We are thus recommended to
consider the labour of reason as ended, when we have merely
dispensed with its employment, which is guided surely and safely
only by the order of nature and the series of changes in the world-
which are arranged according to immanent and general laws. This
error may be avoided, if we do not merely consider from the view-point
of final aims certain parts of nature, such as the division and
structure of a continent, the constitution and direction of certain
mountain-chains, or even the organization existing in the vegetable
and animal kingdoms, but look upon this systematic unity of nature
in a perfectly general way, in relation to the idea of a Supreme
Intelligence. If we pursue this advice, we lay as a foundation for
all investigation the conformity to aims of all phenomena of nature
in accordance with universal laws, for which no particular arrangement
of nature is exempt, but only cognized by us with more or less
difficulty; and we possess a regulative principle of the systematic
unity of a teleological connection, which we do not attempt to
anticipate or predetermine. All that we do, and ought to do, is to
follow out the physico-mechanical connection in nature according to
general laws, with the hope of discovering, sooner or later, the
teleological connection also. Thus, and thus only, can the principle
of final unity aid in the extension of the employment of reason in
the sphere of experience, without being in any case detrimental to
its interests.

[*Footnote: This was the term applied by the old dialecticians to a
sophistical argument, which ran thus: If it is your fate to die of
this disease, you will die, whether you employ a physician or not.
Cicero says that this mode of reasoning has received this appellation,
because, if followed, it puts an end to the employment of reason in
the affairs of life. For a similar reason, I have applied this designation
to the sophistical argument of pure reason.]

The second error which arises from the misconception of the
principle of systematic unity is that of perverted reason (perversa
ratio, usteron roteron rationis). The idea of systematic unity is
available as a regulative principle in the connection of phenomena
according to general natural laws; and, how far soever we have to
travel upon the path of experience to discover some fact or event,
this idea requires us to believe that we have approached all the
more nearly to the completion of its use in the sphere of nature,
although that completion can never be attained. But this error
reverses the procedure of reason. We begin by hypostatizing the
principle of systematic unity, and by giving an anthropomorphic
determination to the conception of a Supreme Intelligence, and then
proceed forcibly to impose aims upon nature. Thus not only does
teleology, which ought to aid in the completion of unity in accordance
with general laws, operate to the destruction of its influence, but
it hinders reason from attaining its proper aim, that is, the proof,
upon natural grounds, of the existence of a supreme intelligent cause.
For, if we cannot presuppose supreme finality in nature a priori, that
is, as essentially belonging to nature, how can we be directed to
endeavour to discover this unity and, rising gradually through its
different degrees, to approach the supreme perfection of an author
of all--a perfection which is absolutely necessary, and therefore
cognizable a priori? The regulative principle directs us to presuppose
systematic unity absolutely and, consequently, as following from the
essential nature of things--but only as a unity of nature, not
merely cognized empirically, but presupposed a priori, although only
in an indeterminate manner. But if I insist on basing nature upon
the foundation of a supreme ordaining Being, the unity of nature is
in effect lost. For, in this case, it is quite foreign and unessential
to the nature of things, and cannot be cognized from the general laws
of nature. And thus arises a vicious circular argument, what ought
to have been proved having been presupposed.

To take the regulative principle of systematic unity in nature for
a constitutive principle, and to hypostatize and make a cause out of
that which is properly the ideal ground of the consistent and
harmonious exercise of reason, involves reason in inextricable
embarrassments. The investigation of nature pursues its own path under
the guidance of the chain of natural causes, in accordance with the
general laws of nature, and ever follows the light of the idea of an
author of the universe--not for the purpose of deducing the
finality, which it constantly pursues, from this Supreme Being, but
to attain to the cognition of his existence from the finality which
it seeks in the existence of the phenomena of nature, and, if possible,
in that of all things to cognize this being, consequently, as
absolutely necessary. Whether this latter purpose succeed or not,
the idea is and must always be a true one, and its employment, when
merely regulative, must always be accompanied by truthful and
beneficial results.

Complete unity, in conformity with aims, constitutes absolute
perfection. But if we do not find this unity in the nature of the
things which go to constitute the world of experience, that is, of
objective cognition, consequently in the universal and necessary
laws of nature, how can we infer from this unity the idea of the
supreme and absolutely necessary perfection of a primal being, which
is the origin of all causality? The greatest systematic unity, and
consequently teleological unity, constitutes the very foundation of
the possibility of the most extended employment of human reason. The
idea of unity is therefore essentially and indissolubly connected with
the nature of our reason. This idea is a legislative one; and hence
it is very natural that we should assume the existence of a legislative
reason corresponding to it, from which the systematic unity of nature-
the object of the operations of reason--must be derived.

In the course of our discussion of the antinomies, we stated that it
is always possible to answer all the questions which pure reason may
raise; and that the plea of the limited nature of our cognition, which
is unavoidable and proper in many questions regarding natural
phenomena, cannot in this case be admitted, because the questions
raised do not relate to the nature of things, but are necessarily
originated by the nature of reason itself, and relate to its own
internal constitution. We can now establish this assertion, which at
first sight appeared so rash, in relation to the two questions in
which reason takes the greatest interest, and thus complete our
discussion of the dialectic of pure reason.

If, then, the question is asked, in relation to transcendental
theology,* first, whether there is anything distinct from the world,
which contains the ground of cosmical order and connection according
to general laws? The answer is: Certainly. For the world is a sum of
phenomena; there must, therefore, be some transcendental basis of
these phenomena, that is, a basis cogitable by the pure
understanding alone. If, secondly, the question is asked whether
this being is substance, whether it is of the greatest reality,
whether it is necessary, and so forth? I answer that this question
is utterly without meaning. For all the categories which aid me in
forming a conception of an object cannot be employed except in the
world of sense, and are without meaning when not applied to objects
of actual or possible experience. Out of this sphere, they are not
properly conceptions, but the mere marks or indices of conceptions,
which we may admit, although they cannot, without the help of
experience, help us to understand any subject or thing. If, thirdly,
the question is whether we may not cogitate this being, which is
distinct from the world, in analogy with the objects of experience?
The answer is: Undoubtedly, but only as an ideal, and not as a real
object. That is, we must cogitate it only as an unknown substratum
of the systematic unity, order, and finality of the world--a unity
which reason must employ as the regulative principle of its
investigation of nature. Nay, more, we may admit into the idea certain
anthropomorphic elements, which are promotive of the interests of this
regulative principle. For it is no more than an idea, which does not
relate directly to a being distinct from the world, but to the
regulative principle of the systematic unity of the world, by means,
however, of a schema of this unity--the schema of a Supreme
Intelligence, who is the wisely-designing author of the universe. What
this basis of cosmical unity may be in itself, we know not--we
cannot discover from the idea; we merely know how we ought to employ
the idea of this unity, in relation to the systematic operation of
reason in the sphere of experience.

[*Footnote: After what has been said of the psychological idea of the
ego and its proper employment as a regulative principle of the operations
of reason, I need not enter into details regarding the transcendental
illusion by which the systematic unity of all the various phenomena
of the internal sense is hypostatized. The procedure is in this case
very similar to that which has been discussed in our remarks on the
theological ideal.]

But, it will be asked again, can we on these grounds, admit the
existence of a wise and omnipotent author of the world? Without doubt;
and not only so, but we must assume the existence of such a being.
But do we thus extend the limits of our knowledge beyond the field
of possible experience? By no means. For we have merely presupposed
a something, of which we have no conception, which we do not know as
it is in itself; but, in relation to the systematic disposition of
the universe, which we must presuppose in all our observation of nature,
we have cogitated this unknown being in analogy with an intelligent
existence (an empirical conception), that is to say, we have endowed
it with those attributes, which, judging from the nature of our own
reason, may contain the ground of such a systematic unity. This idea
is therefore valid only relatively to the employment in experience
of our reason. But if we attribute to it absolute and objective
validity, we overlook the fact that it is merely an ideal being that
we cogitate; and, by setting out from a basis which is not
determinable by considerations drawn from experience, we place
ourselves in a position which incapacitates us from applying this
principle to the empirical employment of reason.

But, it will be asked further, can I make any use of this conception
and hypothesis in my investigations into the world and nature? Yes,
for this very purpose was the idea established by reason as a
fundamental basis. But may I regard certain arrangements, which seemed
to have been made in conformity with some fixed aim, as the
arrangements of design, and look upon them as proceeding from the
divine will, with the intervention, however, of certain other
particular arrangements disposed to that end? Yes, you may do so;
but at the same time you must regard it as indifferent, whether it
is asserted that divine wisdom has disposed all things in conformity
with his highest aims, or that the idea of supreme wisdom is a
regulative principle in the investigation of nature, and at the same
time a principle of the systematic unity of nature according to
general laws, even in those cases where we are unable to discover that
unity. In other words, it must be perfectly indifferent to you whether
you say, when you have discovered this unity: God has wisely willed
it so; or: Nature has wisely arranged this. For it was nothing but
the systematic unity, which reason requires as a basis for the
investigation of nature, that justified you in accepting the idea of
a supreme intelligence as a schema for a regulative principle; and,
the farther you advance in the discovery of design and finality, the
more certain the validity of your idea. But, as the whole aim of
this regulative principle was the discovery of a necessary and
systematic unity in nature, we have, in so far as we attain this, to
attribute our success to the idea of a Supreme Being; while, at the
same time, we cannot, without involving ourselves in contradictions,
overlook the general laws of nature, as it was in reference to them
alone that this idea was employed. We cannot, I say, overlook the
general laws of nature, and regard this conformity to aims
observable in nature as contingent or hyperphysical in its origin;
inasmuch as there is no ground which can justify us in the admission
of a being with such properties distinct from and above nature. All
that we are authorized to assert is that this idea may be employed
as a principle, and that the properties of the being which is
assumed to correspond to it may be regarded as systematically
connected in analogy with the causal determination of phenomena.

For the same reasons we are justified in introducing into the idea
of the supreme cause other anthropomorphic elements (for without these
we could not predicate anything of it); we may regard it as
allowable to cogitate this cause as a being with understanding, the
feelings of pleasure and displeasure, and faculties of desire and will
corresponding to these. At the same time, we may attribute to this
being infinite perfection--a perfection which necessarily transcends
that which our knowledge of the order and design in the world
authorize us to predicate of it. For the regulative law of
systematic unity requires us to study nature on the supposition that
systematic and final unity in infinitum is everywhere discoverable,
even in the highest diversity. For, although we may discover little
of this cosmical perfection, it belongs to the legislative prerogative
of reason to require us always to seek for and to expect it; while
it must always be beneficial to institute all inquiries into nature
in accordance with this principle. But it is evident that, by this
idea of a supreme author of all, which I place as the foundation of
all inquiries into nature, I do not mean to assert the existence of
such a being, or that I have any knowledge of its existence; and,
consequently, I do not really deduce anything from the existence of
this being, but merely from its idea, that is to say, from the
nature of things in this world, in accordance with this idea. A
certain dim consciousness of the true use of this idea seems to have
dictated to the philosophers of all times the moderate language used
by them regarding the cause of the world. We find them employing the
expressions wisdom and care of nature, and divine wisdom, as
synonymous--nay, in purely speculative discussions, preferring the
former, because it does not carry the appearance of greater
pretensions than such as we are entitled to make, and at the same time
directs reason to its proper field of action--nature and her
phenomena.

Thus, pure reason, which at first seemed to promise us nothing
less than the extension of our cognition beyond the limits of
experience, is found, when thoroughly examined, to contain nothing
but regulative principles, the virtue and function of which is to
introduce into our cognition a higher degree of unity than the
understanding could of itself. These principles, by placing the goal
of all our struggles at so great a distance, realize for us the most
thorough connection between the different parts of our cognition,
and the highest degree of systematic unity. But, on the other hand,
if misunderstood and employed as constitutive principles of
transcendent cognition, they become the parents of illusions and
contradictions, while pretending to introduce us to new regions of
knowledge.

Thus all human cognition begins with intuitions, proceeds from
thence to conceptions, and ends with ideas. Although it possesses,
in relation to all three elements, a priori sources of cognition,
which seemed to transcend the limits of all experience, a
thoroughgoing criticism demonstrates that speculative reason can
never, by the aid of these elements, pass the bounds of possible
experience, and that the proper destination of this highest faculty
of cognition is to employ all methods, and all the principles of these
methods, for the purpose of penetrating into the innermost secrets
of nature, by the aid of the principles of unity (among all kinds of
which teleological unity is the highest), while it ought not to
attempt to soar above the sphere of experience, beyond which there
lies nought for us but the void inane. The critical examination, in
our Transcendental Analytic, of all the propositions which professed
to extend cognition beyond the sphere of experience, completely
demonstrated that they can only conduct us to a possible experience.
If we were not distrustful even of the clearest abstract theorems,
if we were not allured by specious and inviting prospects to escape
from the constraining power of their evidence, we might spare
ourselves the laborious examination of all the dialectical arguments
which a transcendent reason adduces in support of its pretensions;
for we should know with the most complete certainty that, however honest
such professions might be, they are null and valueless, because they
relate to a kind of knowledge to which no man can by any possibility
attain. But, as there is no end to discussion, if we cannot discover
the true cause of the illusions by which even the wisest are deceived,
and as the analysis of all our transcendent cognition into its
elements is of itself of no slight value as a psychological study,
while it is a duty incumbent on every philosopher--it was found
necessary to investigate the dialectical procedure of reason in its
primary sources. And as the inferences of which this dialectic is
the parent are not only deceitful, but naturally possess a profound
interest for humanity, it was advisable at the same time, to give a
full account of the momenta of this dialectical procedure, and to
deposit it in the archives of human reason, as a warning to all future
metaphysicians to avoid these causes of speculative error.

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