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. This land, however, 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.

In humanity's general lust for knowledge, negative judgments, which are negative not merely on the basis of logical form but also on the basis of their content, do not stand in high regard: one regards them as jealous enemies of our unremitting drive straining for the expansion of our cognition, and it almost takes an apology to earn toleration for them, let alone favor and esteem.

lb be sure, logically one can express negatively any propositions that one wants, but in regard to the content of our cognition in general, that is, whether it is expanded or limited by a judgment, negative judgments have the special job solely of preventing error. Hence even negative propositions, which are to prevent a false cognition, are often quite true yet empty where error is never possible, i.e., not appropriate for their purpose, and for this reason are often ridiculous, like the proposition of the scholastic orator that Alexander could not have conquered any lands without an army.

But where the limits of our possible cognition are very narrow, where the temptation to judge is great, where the illusion that presents itself is very deceptive, and where the disadvantage of error is very serious, there the negative in instruction, which serves merely to defend us from errors, is more important than many a positive teaching by means of which our cognition could be augmented.

In whatever way and through whatever means a cognition may relate to objects, that through which it relates immediately to them, and at which all thought as a means is directed as an end, is intuition. This, however, takes place only insofar as the object is given to us; but this in turn, is possible only if it affects' the mind in a certain way. The capacity (receptivity) to acquire representations through the way in which we are affected by objects is called sensibility. Objects are therefore given to us by means of sensibility, and it alone affords us intuitions; but they are thought through the understanding, and from it arise concepts. But all thought, whether straightaway (directe) or through a detour (indirecte), must ultimately be related to intuitions, thus, in our case, to sensibility, since there is no other way in which objects can be given to us.

The effect of an object on the capacity for representation, insofar as we are affected by it, is sensation. That intuition which is related to the object through sensation is called empirical. The undetermined object of an empirical intuition is called appearance.

However it may be with the possibility of concepts from pure reason, they are not merely reflected concepts but inferred concepts. Concepts of the understanding are also thought a priori before experience and on behalf of it; but they contain nothing beyond the unity of reflection on appearances, insofar as these appearances are supposed to belong necessarily to a possible empirical consciousness. Through them alone is cognition, and determination of an object, possible. They also first give material for inferring, and no a priori concepts of objects precede them, from which they could be inferred. On the contrary, their objective reality is founded solely on the fact that because they constitute the intellectual form of all experience, it must always be possible to show their application in experience.

The term "a concept of reason," however, already shows in a provisional way that such a concept will not let itself be limited to experience, because it deals with a cognition (perhaps the whole of possible experience or its empirical synthesis) of which the empirical is only one part; no actual experience is fully sufficient for it, but every experience belongs to it. Concepts of reason serve for comprehension, just as concepts of the understanding serve for understanding (of perceptions). If they contain the unconditioned, then they deal with something under which all experience belongs, but that is never itself an object of experience; something to which reason leads through its inferences, and by which reason estimates and measures the degree of its empirical use, but that never constitutes a member of the empirical synthesis.

It is humiliating for human reason that it accomplishes nothing in its pure use, and even requires a discipline to check its extravagances and avoid the deceptions that come from them. But, on the other side, that reason can and must exercise this discipline itself, without allowing anything else to censor it, elevates it and gives it confidence in itself, for the boundaries that it is required to set for its speculative use at the same time limit the sophistical pretensions of every opponent, and thus it can secure against all attacks everything that may still be left to it from its previously exaggerated demands. The greatest and perhaps only utility of all philosophy of pure reason is thus only negative, namely that it does not serve for expansion, as an Organon, but rather, as a discipline, serves for the determination of boundaries, and instead of discovering truth it has only the silent merit of guarding against errors.

Nevertheless, there must somewhere be a source of positive cognitions that belong in the domain of pure reason, and that perhaps give occasion for errors only through misunderstanding, but that in fact constitute the goal of the strenuous effort of reason. For to what cause should the unquenchable desire to find a firm footing beyond all bounds of experience otherwise be ascribed? Pure reason has a presentiment of objects of great interest to it. It takes the path of mere speculation in order to come closer to these; but they flee before it. Presumably it may hope for better luck on the only path that still remains to it, namely that of its practical use.

If one sets a faculty of cognition into play, then on various occasions different concepts will become prominent that will make this faculty known and that can be collected in a more or less exhaustive treatise depending on whether they have been observed for a longer time or with greater acuteness. Where this investigation will be completed can never be determined with certainty by means of this as it were mechanical procedure. Further, the concepts that are discovered only as the opportunity arises will not reveal any order and systematic unity, but will rather be ordered in pairs only according to similarities and placed in series only in accord with the magnitude of their content, from the simple to the more composite, which series are by no means systematic even if to some extent methodically produced.

Transcendental philosophy has the advantage but also the obligation to seek its concepts in accordance with a principle since they spring pure and unmixed from the understanding, as absolute unity, and must therefore be connected among themselves in accordance with a concept or idea. Such a connection, however, provides a rule by means of which the place of each pure concept of the understanding and the completeness of all of them together can be determined a priori, which would otherwise depend upon whim or chance.

On the difference between pure and empirical cognition

There is no doubt whatever that all our cognition begins with experience; for how else should the cognitive faculty be awakened into exercise if not through objects that stimulate our senses and in part themselves produce representations, in part bring the activity of our understanding into motion to compare these, to connect or separate them, and thus to work up the raw material of sensible impressions into a cognition of objects that is called experience? As far as time is concerned, then, no cognition in us precedes experience, and with experience every cognition begins.

But although all our cognition commences with experience, yet it does not on that account all arise from experience. For it could well be that even our experiential cognition is a composite of that which we receive through impressions and that which our own cognitive faculty (merely prompted by sensible impressions) provides out of itself, which addition we cannot distinguish from that fundamental material until long practice has made us attentive to it and skilled in separating it out.

It is therefore at least a question requiring closer investigation, and one not to be dismissed at first glance, whether there is any such cognition independent of all experience and even of all impressions of the senses. One calls such cognitions a priori, and distinguishes them from empirical ones, which have their sources a posteriori, namely in experience.

Whether or not the treatment of the cognitions belonging to the concern of reason travels the secure course of a science is something which can soon be judged by its success. If after many preliminaries and preparations are made, a science gets stuck as soon as it approaches its end, or if in order to reach this end it must often go back and set out on a new path; or likewise if it proves impossible for the different co-workers to achieve unanimity as to the way in which they should pursue their common aim; then we may be sure that such a study is merely groping about, that it is still far from having entered upon the secure course of a science; and it is already a service to reason if we can possibly find that path for it, even if we have to give up as futile much of what was included in the end previously formed without deliberation.

That from the earliest times logic has traveled this secure course can be seen from the fact that since the time of Aristotle it has not had to go a single step backwards, unless we count the abolition of a few dispensable subtleties or the more distinct determination of its presentation, which improvements belong more to the elegance than to the security of that science.

Introduction I Transcendental illusion.

Above we have called dialectic in general a logic of illusion That does not mean that it is a doctrine of probability;' for that is truth, but cognized through insufficient grounds, so that the cognition of it is defective, but not therefore deceptive, and so it need not be separated from the analytical part of logic. Still less may we take appearance and illusion for one and the same. For truth and illusion are not in the object, insofar as it is intuited, but in the judgment about it insofar as it is thought. Thus it is correctly said that the senses do not err; yet not because they always judge correcdy, but because they do not judge at all. Hence truth, as much as error, and thus also illusion as leading to the latter, are to be found only in judgments, i.e., only in the relation of the object to our understanding. In a cognition that thoroughly agrees with the laws of the understanding there is also no error. In a representation of sense (because it contains no judgment at all) there is no error. No force of nature can of itself depart from its own laws. Hence neither the understanding by itself (without the influence of another cause), nor the senses by themselves, can err; the first cannot, because while it acts merely according to its own laws, its effect (the judgment) must necessarily agree with these laws.

By an architectonic I understand the art of systems. Since systematic unity is that which first makes ordinary cognition into science, i.e., makes a system out of a mere aggregate of it, architectonic is the doctrine of that which is scientific in our cognition in general, and therefore necessarily belongs to the doctrine of method.

Under the government of reason our cognitions cannot at all constitute a rhapsody but must constitute a system, in which alone they can support and advance its essential ends. I understand by a system, however, the unity of the manifold cognitions under one idea. This is the rational concept of the form of a whole, insofar as through this the domain of the manifold as well as the position of the parts with respect to each other is determined a prion. The scientific rational concept thus contains the end and the form of the whole that is congruent with it. The unity of the end, to which all parts are related and in the idea of which they are also related to each other, allows the absence of any part to be noticed in our knowledge of the rest, and there can be no contingent addition or undetermined magnitude of perfection that does not have its boundaries determined a priori. The whole is therefore articulated (articulatio) and not heaped together (coacervatio); it can, to be sure, grow internally (per intus susceptionem) but not externally (per ap-positionem), like an animal body, whose growth does not add a limb but rather makes each limb stronger and fitter for its end without any alteration of proportion.

We have shown in the introduction to this part of our work that every transcendental illusion of pure reason rests on dialectical inferences, whose schema is provided in general by logic in the three formal species of syllogisms, just as the categories find their logical schema in the four functions of all judgments. The first species of these sophistical inferences had to do with the unconditioned unity of the subjective conditions of all representations in general (of the subject or the soul), corresponding to the categorical syllogisms, whose major premise, as a principle, states the relation of a predicate to a subject. Thus the second species of dialectical argument, by analogy with hypothetical syllogisms, will make the unconditioned unity of objective conditions in appearance its content, just as the third species, which will come forward in the following chapter, has as its theme the unconditioned unity of objective conditions of the possibility of objects in general.

It is remarkable, however, that the transcendental paralogism effects a merely one-sided illusion regarding the idea of the subject of our thought, and for the opposite assertion there is not the least plausibility forthcoming from concepts of reason. The advantage is entirely on the side of pneumatism, even though pneumatism cannot deny that radical defect through which its entire plausibility dissolves into mere haze when put to the fiery test of critique.

[Cosmology]

PART <PARS> II

§354. It is not necessary that the finitude of the world, which is yet to be proven, is brought into the definition.

The world is a real whole <totum reale>: all things in it stand in real connection <in nexu reali>.

The world is a whole which is not part of another <totum quod non est pars alterius>: otherwise this would be only a piece of the world.

The world is therefore a (real) whole of actual things, which is not part of another <mundus ergo est totum (reale) actualium, quod non est pars alteriu<.

357. All things are in real connection <in realnexu>: they are connected in certain determinations, be they as they may.

358. (In this world) the world is present, of which I am a part. There is a reciprocal connection, either mediately or immediately <(in hoc mundo) mundus praesens est, cujus sum pars ego. Est nexus mutuus vel mediate vel immediate>.

361. (Cf. §354, as a proposition to be proven, should not be brought into the definition) As parts, all parts of the whole are in real connection <in realnexu> with one another as component parts <compartibus>: because they are grounds of the whole, and the whole cannot subsist without them. A part thus depends on some determinations of the others: consequently no part in the whole is independent – the whole [is] not independent – [but] contingent.

Remarks on metaphysics according to Baumgarten from the lectures of Prof. Kant for <pro> 1794/95

[Introduction]

(I)b Metaphysics belongs to the material part of philosophy, or rather contains that within itself, and therefore, since it presupposes actual objects, rests on laws, i.e., on grounds of cognition (principles <principiis>) of and about that which belongs to the existence of things. From it, therefore, is separated' the merely formal part of philosophy, or the laws of thinking expounded in logic, since the latter abstracts from the objects themselves. It is thereby already distinguished from mathematics, since this rests not, as philosophy, on laws of the cognition of things, but rather on concepts of things made through construction.

Metaphysical cognitions must therefore be cognitions simply of reason, thus arise a priori through pure concepts of reason, i.e., the principles <principia> or grounds of cognition are so constituted that one connects the necessity of what one cognizes with the cognition itself, and the concepts are directed at objects that not only are cognized independently of all experience, but that also can never possibly become an object of experience. E.g., God, freedom, immortality. They differ thus diametrically <e diametro> from all empirical appearances and principles derived therefrom: metaphysics thus has no a posteriori principles <principia>, but rather only a priori: they are given and are cognized through reason alone, but are not made.

(2) Cosmology

CONCEPT OF THE WORLD

Because cosmology borrows its principles not from experience, but rather from pure reason, it can be called rational cosmology. But because even the object as well, and not just the principles, is an object of pure reason and not experience, it is called transcendental cosmology <cosmologia transscendentalis>. In the Ontology we have already spoken of the limiting concepts, which constitute the limit in the series of cognitions. – In relation there were these three concepts: the relation of the substance to the accident; of the cause to the effect, and of the whole to the parts. – In all these cognitions we can think of a first and a last, through which a completeness <completudo> or totality arises in these cognitions. – In the relation of the substance to the accident, the substantial is that which is not an accident of another. – In the relation of the cause to the effect the first cause is the limiting concept, which is no effect of another <causatum alterius>. – In the third relation of the whole to the parts, the limiting concept is the whole which is not a part of another; and that is the concept of the world. This concept is a pure concept of reason, and is not arbitrary, but rather is necessary to human reason. Our reason has a need that is not satisfied until it meets a completeness <completudinem> in the series of things, or until it can think a complete totality.