Opening the text
A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason'

Kant · en
“The mind listens to the voice of Reason which, for every given
     magnitude--even for those that can never be entirely apprehended,
     although (in sensible representation) they are judged as entirely
     given--requires totality.... It does not even except the infinite
     (space and past time) from this requirement; on the contrary, it
     renders it unavoidable to think the infinite (in the judgment of
     common reason) as _entirely given_ (in its totality). But the
     infinite is absolutely (not merely comparatively) great. Compared
     with it everything else (of the same kind of magnitudes) is small.
     But what is most important is that the mere ability to think it as
     _a whole_ indicates a faculty of mind which surpasses every
     standard of sense.... The _bare capability of thinking_ the given
     infinite without contradiction requires in the human mind a faculty
     itself supersensible. For it is only by means of this faculty and
     its Idea of a noumenon ... that the infinite of the world of sense,
     in the pure intellectual estimation of magnitude, can be
     _completely_ comprehended _under_ one concept.... Nature is,
     therefore, sublime in those of its phenomena, whose intuition
     brings with it the Idea of its infinity.... For just as imagination
     and _understanding_, in judging of the beautiful, generate a
     subjective purposiveness of the mental powers by means of their
     harmony, so imagination and _Reason_ do so by means of their
     conflict.”[420]

Kant has here departed very far indeed from the position of the
_Aesthetic_.[421]




THE TRANSCENDENTAL AESTHETIC


SECTION I

SPACE

METAPHYSICAL EXPOSITION OF THE CONCEPTION OF SPACE[422]

     =Space: First Argument.=--“Space is not an empirical concept
     (_Begriff_) which has been abstracted from outer experiences. For
     in order that certain sensations be related to something outside me
     (_i.e._ to something in another region of space from that in which
     I find myself), and similarly in order that I may be able to
     represent them as outside [and _alongside_][423] one another, and
     accordingly as not only [qualitatively] different but as in
     different places, the representation of space must be presupposed
     (_muss schon zum Grunde liegen_). The representation of space
     cannot, therefore, be empirically obtained at second-hand from the
     relations of outer appearance. This outer experience is itself
     possible at all only through that representation.”[424]