Within a few years of the publication of his Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was recognized by his contemporaries as one of the seminal philosophers of modern times - indeed as one of the great philosophers of all time. This renown soon spread beyond German-speaking lands, and translations of Kant's work into English were published even before 1800. Since then, interpretations of Kant's views have come and gone and loyalty to his positions has waxed and waned, but his importance has not diminished. Generations of scholars have devoted their efforts to producing reliable translations of Kant into English as well as into other languages. There are four main reasons for the present edition of Kant's writings:

Completeness. Although most of the works published in Kant's lifetime have been translated before, the most important ones more than once, only fragments of Kant's many important unpublished works have ever been translated. These include the Opuspostumum, Kant's unfinished magnum opus on the transition from philosophy to physics; transcriptions of his classroom lectures; his correspondence; and his marginalia and other notes. One aim of this edition is to make a comprehensive sampling of these materials available in English for the first time.

On the regulative use of the ideas of pure reason.

The outcome of all dialectical attempts of pure reason not only confirms what we have already proved in the Transcendental Analytic, namely that all the inferences that would carry us out beyond the field of possible experience are deceptive and groundless, but it also simultaneously teaches us this particular lesson: that human reason has a natural propensity to overstep all these boundaries, and that transcendental ideas are just as natural to it as the categories are to the understanding, although with this difference, that just as the categories lead to truth, i.e., to the agreement of our concepts with their objects, the ideas effect a mere, but irresistible, illusion, deception by which one can hardly resist even through the most acute criticism.

Everything grounded in the nature of our powers must be purposive and consistent with their correct use, if only we can guard against a certain misunderstanding and find out their proper direction. Thus the transcendental ideas too will presumably have a good and consequently immanent use, even though, if their significance is misunderstood and they are taken for concepts of real things, they can be transcendent in their application and for that very reason deceptive.

We have now not only traveled through the land of pure understanding, and carefully inspected each part of it, but we have also surveyed it, and determined the place for each thing in it. But this land is an island, and enclosed in unalterable boundaries by nature itself. It is the land of truth (a charming name), surrounded by a broad and stormy ocean, the true seat of illusion, where many a fog bank and rapidly melting iceberg pretend to be new lands and, ceaselessly deceiving with empty hopes the voyager looking around for new discoveries, entwine him in adventures from which he can never escape and yet also never bring to an end. But before we venture out on this sea, to search through all its breadth and become certain of whether there is anything to hope for in it, it will be useful first to cast yet another glance at the map of the land that we would now leave, and to ask, first, whether we could not be satisfied with what it contains, or even must be satisfied with it out of necessity, if there is no other ground on which we could build; and, second, by what title we occupy even this land, and can hold it securely against all hostile claims. Although we have already adequately answered these questions in the course of the Analytic, a summary overview of their solutions can still strengthen conviction by unifying their various moments in one point.

Now since the proposition I think (taken problematically) contains the form of every judgment of understanding whatever, and accompanies all categories as their vehicle, it is clear that the inferences from this proposition can contain a merely transcendental use of the understanding, excluding every admixture of experience; and of such a procedure, after what we have shown above, we cannot at the outset form any very favorable concept. Thus we will follow it through all the predications of the pure doctrine of the soul with a critical eye, <yet for the sake of brevity we will proceed to examine them in an uninterrupted exposition.

To begin with, the following general remarks can sharpen our attentiveness to this mode of inference. I do not cognize any object merely by the fact that I think, but rather I can cognize any object only by determining a given intuition with regard to the unity of consciousness, in which all thinking consists. Thus I cognize myself not by being conscious of myself as thinking, but only if I am conscious to myself of the intuition of myself as determined in regard to the function of thought. All modi of self-consciousness in thinking are therefore not yet themselves concepts of the understanding of objects (categories), but mere functions, which provide thought with no object at all, and hence also do not present my self as an object to be cognized. It is not the consciousness of the determining self, but only that of the determinable self, i.e., of my inner intuition (insofar as its manifold can be combined in accord with the universal condition of the unity of apperception in thinking), that is the object.

General logic is constructed on a plan that corresponds quite precisely with the division of the higher faculties of cognition. These are: understanding, the power of judgment, and reason. In its analytic that doctrine accordingly deals with concepts, judgments, and inferences, corresponding exactly to the functions and the order of those powers of mind, which are comprehended under the broad designation of understanding in general.

Since merely formal logic, so conceived, abstracts from all content of cognition (whether it be pure or empirical), and concerns itself merely with the form of thinking (of discursive cognition) in general, it can also include in its analytical part the canon for reason, the form of which has its secure precept, into which there can be apriori insight through mere analysis of the actions of reason into their moments, without taking into consideration the particular nature of the cognition about which it is employed.

Transcendental logic, since it is limited to a determinate content, namely that of pure a priori cognitions alone, cannot imitate general logic in this division. For it turns out that the transcendental use of reason is not objectively valid at all, thus does not belong to the logic of truth, i.e., the analytic, but rather, as a logic of illusion, requires a special part of the scholastic edifice, under the name of the transcendental dialectic.

First Section

On the principles of a transcendental deduction in general.

Jurists, when they speak of entitlements and claims, distinguish in a legal matter between the questions about what is lawful (quid juris) and that which concerns the fact (quid facti), and since they demand proof of both, they call the first, that which is to establish the entitlement or the legal claim, the deduction. We make use of a multitude of empirical concepts without objection from anyone, and take ourselves to be justified in granting them a sense and a supposed signification even without any deduction, because we always have experience ready at hand to prove their objective reality. But there are also concepts that have been usurped, such as fortune and fate, which circulate with almost universal indulgence, but that are occasionally called upon to establish their claim by the question quid juris, and then there is not a little embarrassment about their deduction because one can adduce no clear legal ground for an entitlement to their use either from experience or from reason.

Among the many concepts, however, that constitute the very mixed fabric of human cognition, there are some that are also destined' for pure use apriori (completely independently of all experience), and these always require a deduction of their entitlement, since proofs from experience are not sufficient for the lawfulness of such a use, and yet one must know how these concepts can be related to objects that they do not derive from any experience.

A logical paralogism consists in the falsity of a syllogism due to its form, whatever its content may otherwise be. A transcendental paralogism, however, has a transcendental ground for inferring falsely due to its form. Thus a fallacy of this kind will have its ground in the nature of human reason, and will bring with it an unavoidable, although not insoluble, illusion.

Now we come to a concept that was not catalogued above in the general list of transcendental concepts, and nevertheless must be assigned to it, yet without altering that table in the least and declaring it defective. This is the concept - or rather, if one prefers, the judgment - I think. But one will easily see that this concept is the vehicle of all concepts whatever, and hence also of transcendental concepts, and is thus always comprehended among them, and hence is likewise transcendental, but that it can have no special title, because it serves only to intraduce all thinking as belonging to consciousness. Meanwhile, however pure from the empirical (from impressions of sense) it may be, it still serves to distinguish two kinds of objects through the nature of our power of representation. I, as thinking, am an object of inner sense, and am called “soul.”

Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.

Reason falls into this perplexity through no fault of its own. It begins from principles whose use is unavoidable in the course of experience and at the same time sufficiently warranted by it. With these principles it rises (as its nature also requires) ever higher, to more remote conditions. But since it becomes aware in this way that its business must always remain incomplete because the questions never cease, reason sees itself necessitated to take refuge in principles that overstep all possible use in experience, and yet seem so unsuspicious that even ordinary common sense agrees with them. But it thereby falls into obscurity and contradictions, from which it can indeed surmise that it must somewhere be proceeding on the ground of hidden errors; but it cannot discover them, for the principles on which it is proceeding, since they surpass the bounds of all experience, no longer recognize any touchstone of experience. The battlefield of these endless controversies is called metaphysics.

This Analytic is the analysis

This Analytic is the analysis of the entirety of our a priori cognition into the elements of the pure cognition of the understanding. It is concerned with the following points: 1. That the concepts be pure and not empirical concepts. 2. That they belong not to intuition and to sensibility, but rather to thinking and understanding. 3. That they be elementary concepts, and clearly distinguished from those which are derived or composed from them. 4. That the table of them be complete, and that they entirely exhaust the entire field of pure understanding. Now this completeness of a science cannot reliably be assumed from a rough calculation of an aggregate put together by mere estimates; hence it is possible only by means of an idea of the whole of the a priori cognition of the understanding, and through the division of concepts that such an idea determines and that constitutes it, thus only through their connection in a system. The pure understanding separates itself completely not only from everything empirical, but even from all sensibility. It is therefore a unity that subsists on its own, which is sufficient by itself, and which is not to be supplemented by any external additions. Hence the sum total of its cognition will constitute a system that is to be grasped and determined under one idea, the completeness and articulation of which system can at the same time yield a touchstone of the correctness and genuineness of all the pieces of cognition fitting into it.

It can be said that the object of a merely transcendental idea is something of which we have no concept, even though this idea is generated in an entirely necessary way by reason according to its original laws. For in fact no concept of the understanding is possible for an object that is to be adequate to the demand of reason, i.e., an object such as can be shown and made intuitive in a possible experience. But we would express ourselves better and with less danger of misunderstanding if we said that we can have no acquaintance with an object that corresponds to an idea, even though we can have a problematic concept of it.

Now at least the transcendental (subjective) reality of pure concepts of reason rests on the fact that we are brought to such ideas by a necessary syllogism. Thus there will be syllogisms containing no empirical premises, by means of which we can infer from something with which we are acquainted to something of which we have no concept, and yet to which we nevertheless, by an unavoidable illusion, give objective reality. In respect of their result, such inferences are thus to be called sophistical rather than rational inferences; even though they might lay claim to the latter term on account of what occasions them, because they are not thought up, nor do they arise contingently, but have sprung from the nature of reason. They are sophistries not of human beings but of pure reason itself, and even the wisest of all human beings cannot get free of them; perhaps after much effort he may guard himself from error, but he can never be wholly rid of the illusion, which ceaselessly teases and mocks him.

In the previous chapter we have considered the transcendental power of judgment only in accordance with the general conditions under which alone it is authorized to use the pure concepts of the understanding for synthetic judgments. Now our task is to exhibit in systematic combination the judgments that the understanding actually brings about a priori subject to this critical warning, for which our table of the categories must doubtless give us natural and secure guidance. For it is precisely these whose relation to possible experience must constitute all pure cognition of the understanding a priori , and whose relation' to sensibility in general will, on that very account, display all transcendental principles of the use of the understanding completely and in a system.

A priori principles bear this name not merely because they contain in themselves the grounds of other judgments, but also because they are not themselves grounded in higher and more general cognitions. Yet this property does not elevate them beyond all proof. For although this could not be carried further objectively, but rather grounds all cognition of its object, yet this does not prevent a proof from the subjective sources of the possibility of a cognition of an object in general from being possible, indeed even necessary, since otherwise the proposition would raise the greatest suspicion of being a merely surreptitious assertion.