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intelligible objects, clearing it from all that is incompatible with

the conception of an ens summun, and eliminating from it all

limitations or admixtures of empirical elements.

Transcendental theology is still therefore, notwithstanding its

objective insufficiency, of importance in a negative respect; it is

useful as a test of the procedure of reason when engaged with pure

ideas, no other than a transcendental standard being in this case

admissible. For if, from a practical point of view, the hypothesis

of a Supreme and All-sufficient Being is to maintain its validity

without opposition, it must be of the highest importance to define

this conception in a correct and rigorous manner- as the

transcendental conception of a necessary being, to eliminate all

phenomenal elements (anthropomorphism in its most extended

signification), and at the same time to overflow all contradictory

assertions- be they atheistic, deistic, or anthropomorphic. This is of

course very easy; as the same arguments which demonstrated the

inability of human reason to affirm the existence of a Supreme Being

must be alike sufficient to prove the invalidity of its denial. For it

is impossible to gain from the pure speculation of reason

demonstration that there exists no Supreme Being, as the ground of all

that exists, or that this being possesses none of those properties

which we regard as analogical with the dynamical qualities of a

thinking being, or that, as the anthropomorphists would have us

believe, it is subject to all the limitations which sensibility

imposes upon those intelligences which exist in the world of

experience.

A Supreme Being is, therefore, for the speculative reason, a mere

ideal, though a faultless one- a conception which perfects and

crowns the system of human cognition, but the objective reality of

which can neither be proved nor disproved by pure reason. If this

defect is ever supplied by a moral theology, the problematic

transcendental theology which has preceded, will have been at least

serviceable as demonstrating the mental necessity existing for the

conception, by the complete determination of it which it has

furnished, and the ceaseless testing of the conclusions of a reason

often deceived by sense, and not always in harmony with its own ideas.

The attributes of necessity, infinitude, unity, existence apart from

the world (and not as a world soul), eternity (free from conditions of

time), omnipresence (free from conditions of space), omnipotence,

and others, are pure transcendental predicates; and thus the

accurate conception of a Supreme Being, which every theology requires,

is furnished by transcendental theology alone.

APPENDIX

APPENDIX.

Of the Regulative Employment of the Ideas of

Pure Reason.

The result of all the dialectical attempts of pure reason not only

confirms the truth of what we have already proved in our

Transcendental Analytic, namely, that all inferences which would

lead us beyond the limits of experience are fallacious and groundless,

but it at the same time teaches us this important lesson, that human

reason has a natural inclination to overstep these limits, and that

transcendental ideas are as much the natural property of the reason as

categories are of the understanding. There exists this difference,

however, that while the categories never mislead us, outward objects

being always in perfect harmony therewith, ideas are the parents of

irresistible illusions, the severest and most subtle criticism being

required to save us from the fallacies which they induce.

Whatever is grounded in the nature of our powers will be found to be

in harmony with the final purpose and proper employment of these

powers, when once we have discovered their true direction and aim.

We are entitled to suppose, therefore, that there exists a mode of

employing transcendental ideas which is proper and immanent; although,

when we mistake their meaning, and regard them as conceptions of

actual things, their mode of application is transcendent and delusive.

For it is not the idea itself, but only the employment of the idea

in relation to possible experience, that is transcendent or

immanent. An idea is employed transcendently, when it is applied to an

object falsely believed to be adequate with and to correspond to it;

imminently, when it is applied solely to the employment of the

understanding in the sphere of experience. Thus all errors of

subreptio- of misapplication, are to be ascribed to defects of

judgement, and not to understanding or reason.

Reason never has an immediate relation to an object; it relates

immediately to the understanding alone. It is only through the

understanding that it can be employed in the field of experience. It

does not form conceptions of objects, it merely arranges them and

gives to them that unity which they are capable of possessing when the

sphere of their application has been extended as widely as possible.

Reason avails itself of the conception of the understanding for the

sole purpose of producing totality in the different series. This

totality the understanding does not concern itself with; its only

occupation is the connection of experiences, by which series of

conditions in accordance with conceptions are established. The

object of reason is, therefore, the understanding and its proper

destination. As the latter brings unity into the diversity of

objects by means of its conceptions, so the former brings unity into

the diversity of conceptions by means of ideas; as it sets the final

aim of a collective unity to the operations of the understanding,

which without this occupies itself with a distributive unity alone.

I accordingly maintain that transcendental ideas can never be

employed as constitutive ideas, that they cannot be conceptions of

objects, and that, when thus considered, they assume a fallacious

and dialectical character. But, on the other hand, they are capable of

an admirable and indispensably necessary application to objects- as

regulative ideas, directing the understanding to a certain aim, the

guiding lines towards which all its laws follow, and in which they all

meet in one point. This point- though a mere idea (focus imaginarius),

that is, not a point from which the conceptions of the understanding

do really proceed, for it lies beyond the sphere of possible

experience- serves, notwithstanding, to give to these conceptions

the greatest possible unity combined with the greatest possible

extension. Hence arises the natural illusion which induces us to

believe that these lines proceed from an object which lies out of

the sphere of empirical cognition, just as objects reflected in a

mirror appear to be behind it. But this illusion- which we may

hinder from imposing upon us- is necessary and unavoidable, if we

desire to see, not only those objects which lie before us, but those

which are at a great distance behind us; that is to say, when, in

the present case, we direct the aims of the understanding, beyond

every given experience, towards an extension as great as can

possibly be attained.

If we review our cognitions in their entire extent, we shall find

that the peculiar business of reason is to arrange them into a system,

that is to say, to give them connection according to a principle. This

unity presupposes an idea- the idea of the form of a whole (of

cognition), preceding the determinate cognition of the parts, and

containing the conditions which determine a priori to every part its

place and relation to the other parts of the whole system. This

idea, accordingly, demands complete unity in the cognition of the

understanding- not the unity of a contingent aggregate, but that of

a system connected according to necessary laws. It cannot be

affirmed with propriety that this idea is a conception of an object;

it is merely a conception of the complete unity of the conceptions

of objects, in so far as this unity is available to the

understanding as a rule. Such conceptions of reason are not derived

from nature; on the contrary, we employ them for the interrogation and

investigation of nature, and regard our cognition as defective so long

as it is not adequate to them. We admit that such a thing as pure

earth, pure water, or pure air, is not to be discovered. And yet we

require these conceptions (which have their origin in the reason, so

far as regards their absolute purity and completeness) for the purpose

of determining the share which each of these natural causes has in

every phenomenon. Thus the different kinds of matter are all ref erred

to earths, as mere weight; to salts and inflammable bodies, as pure

force; and finally, to water and air, as the vehicula of the former,

or the machines employed by them in their operations- for the

purpose of explaining the chemical action and reaction of bodies in

accordance with the idea of a mechanism. For, although not actually so

expressed, the influence of such ideas of reason is very observable in

the procedure of natural philosophers.

If reason is the faculty of deducing the particular from the

general, and if the general be certain in se and given, it is only

necessary that the judgement should subsume the particular under the

general, the particular being thus necessarily determined. I shall

term this the demonstrative or apodeictic employment of reason. If,

however, the general is admitted as problematical only, and is a

mere idea, the particular case is certain, but the universality of the

rule which applies to this particular case remains a problem.

Several particular cases, the certainty of which is beyond doubt,

are then taken and examined, for the purpose of discovering whether

the rule is applicable to them; and if it appears that all the

particular cases which can be collected follow from the rule, its

universality is inferred, and at the same time, all the causes which

have not, or cannot be presented to our observation, are concluded

to be of the same character with those which we have observed. This

I shall term the hypothetical employment of the reason.

The hypothetical exercise of reason by the aid of ideas employed

as problematical conceptions is properly not constitutive. That is

to say, if we consider the subject strictly, the truth of the rule,

which has been employed as an hypothesis, does not follow from the use

that is made of it by reason. For how can we know all the possible

cases that may arise? some of which may, however, prove exceptions

to the universality of the rule. This employment of reason is merely

regulative, and its sole aim is the introduction of unity into the

aggregate of our particular cognitions, and thereby the

approximating of the rule to universality.

The object of the hypothetical employment of reason is therefore the

systematic unity of cognitions; and this unity is the criterion of the

truth of a rule. On the other hand, this systematic unity- as a mere

idea- is in fact merely a unity projected, not to be regarded as

given, but only in the light of a problem- a problem which serves,

however, as a principle for the various and particular exercise of the

understanding in experience, directs it with regard to those cases

which are not presented to our observation, and introduces harmony and

consistency into all its operations.

All that we can be certain of from the above considerations is

that this systematic unity is a logical principle, whose aim is to

assist the understanding, where it cannot of itself attain to rules,

by means of ideas, to bring all these various rules under one

principle, and thus to ensure the most complete consistency and

connection that can be attained. But the assertion that objects and

the understanding by which they are cognized are so constituted as

to be determined to systematic unity, that this may be postulated a

priori, without any reference to the interest of reason, and that we

are justified in declaring all possible cognitions- empirical and

others- to possess systematic unity, and to be subject to general

principles from which, notwithstanding their various character, they

are all derivable such an assertion can be founded only upon a

transcendental principle of reason, which would render this systematic

unity not subjectively and logically- in its character of a method,

but objectively necessary.

We shall illustrate this by an example. The conceptions of the

understanding make us acquainted, among many other kinds of unity,

with that of the causality of a substance, which is termed power.

The different phenomenal manifestations of the same substance appear

at first view to be so very dissimilar that we are inclined to

assume the existence of just as many different powers as there are

different effects- as, in the case of the human mind, we have feeling,

consciousness, imagination, memory, wit, analysis, pleasure, desire

and so on. Now we are required by a logical maxim to reduce these

differences to as small a number as possible, by comparing them and

discovering the hidden identity which exists. We must inquire, for

example, whether or not imagination (connected with consciousness),

memory, wit, and analysis are not merely different forms of

understanding and reason. The idea of a fundamental power, the

existence of which no effort of logic can assure us of, is the problem

to be solved, for the systematic representation of the existing

variety of powers. The logical principle of reason requires us to

produce as great a unity as is possible in the system of our

cognitions; and the more the phenomena of this and the other power are

found to be identical, the more probable does it become, that they are

nothing but different manifestations of one and the same power,

which may be called, relatively speaking, a fundamental power. And

so with other cases.

These relatively fundamental powers must again be compared with each

other, to discover, if possible, the one radical and absolutely

fundamental power of which they are but the manifestations. But this