Causation; Knowledge, Theory of; Philosophy, German; Reason
1. Reason, as observed in the syllogistic process, is not applicable to
intuitions, for the purpose of subjecting them to rules—for this is the
province of the understanding with its categories—but to conceptions
and judgements. If pure reason does apply to objects and the intuition
of them, it does so not immediately, but mediately—through the
understanding and its judgements, which have a direct relation to the
senses and their intuition, for the purpose of determining their
objects. The unity of reason is therefore not the unity of a possible
experience, but is essentially different from this unity, which is that
of the understanding. That everything which happens has a cause, is not
a principle cognized and prescribed by reason. This principle makes the
unity of experience possible and borrows nothing from reason, which,
without a reference to possible experience, could never have produced
by means of mere conceptions any such synthetical unity.
2. Reason, in its logical use, endeavours to discover the general
condition of its judgement (the conclusion), and a syllogism is itself
nothing but a judgement by means of the subsumption of its condition
under a general rule (the major). Now as this rule may itself be
subjected to the same process of reason, and thus the condition of the
condition be sought (by means of a prosyllogism) as long as the process
can be continued, it is very manifest that the peculiar principle of
reason in its logical use is to find for the conditioned cognition of
the understanding the unconditioned whereby the unity of the former is
completed.
But this logical maxim cannot be a principle of pure reason, unless we
admit that, if the conditioned is given, the whole series of conditions
subordinated to one another—a series which is consequently itself
unconditioned—is also given, that is, contained in the object and its
connection.
But this principle of pure reason is evidently synthetical; for,
analytically, the conditioned certainly relates to some condition, but
not to the unconditioned. From this principle also there must originate
different synthetical propositions, of which the pure understanding is
perfectly ignorant, for it has to do only with objects of a possible
experience, the cognition and synthesis of which is always conditioned.
The unconditioned, if it does really exist, must be especially
considered in regard to the determinations which distinguish it from
whatever is conditioned, and will thus afford us material for many à
priori synthetical propositions.
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