In truth, it is not images of objects, but schemata, which lie at the
foundation of our pure sensuous conceptions. No image could ever be
adequate to our conception of a triangle in general. For the
generalness of the conception it never could attain to, as this
includes under itself all triangles, whether right-angled,
acute-angled, etc., whilst the image would always be limited to a
single part of this sphere. The schema of the triangle can exist
nowhere else than in thought, and it indicates a rule of the synthesis
of the imagination in regard to pure figures in space. Still less is an
object of experience, or an image of the object, ever to the empirical
conception. On the contrary, the conception always relates immediately
to the schema of the imagination, as a rule for the determination of
our intuition, in conformity with a certain general conception. The
conception of a dog indicates a rule, according to which my imagination
can delineate the figure of a four-footed animal in general, without
being limited to any particular individual form which experience
presents to me, or indeed to any possible image that I can represent to
myself in concreto. This schematism of our understanding in regard to
phenomena and their mere form, is an art, hidden in the depths of the
human soul, whose true modes of action we shall only with difficulty
discover and unveil. Thus much only can we say: “The image is a product
of the empirical faculty of the productive imagination—the schema of
sensuous conceptions (of figures in space, for example) is a product,
and, as it were, a monogram of the pure imagination à priori, whereby
and according to which images first become possible, which, however,
can be connected with the conception only mediately by means of the
schema which they indicate, and are in themselves never fully adequate
to it.” On the other hand, the schema of a pure conception of the
understanding is something that cannot be reduced into any image—it is
nothing else than the pure synthesis expressed by the category,
conformably, to a rule of unity according to conceptions. It is a
transcendental product of the imagination, a product which concerns the
determination of the internal sense, according to conditions of its
form (time) in respect to all representations, in so far as these
representations must be conjoined à priori in one conception,
conformably to the unity of apperception.
Without entering upon a dry and tedious analysis of the essential
requisites of transcendental schemata of the pure conceptions of the
understanding, we shall rather proceed at once to give an explanation
of them according to the order of the categories, and in connection
therewith.