Immanuel Kant: Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science: With Selections from the Critique of Pure Reason

The Göttingen Review

Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant

1781. 856 p. Octavo

This work–which always exercises the understanding of its reader if not always instructing it, often strains the attention to exhaustion, occasionally comes to its aid with fortunate images or rewards it with unexpected, generally useful conclusions – is a system of higher, or, as the author calls it, transcendental idealism; an idealism that comprehends spirit and matter in the same way, transforms the world and our self into representations, and has all objects being generated from appearances, in that the understanding connects them into one experiential series and reason necessarily though vainly seeks to extend and unite them into one whole and complete world system. The author's system rests on approximately the following main principles. All our cognitions arise from certain modifications of our self that we call sensations. What they exist in, whence they are aroused, that is at bottom completely unknown to us. If there might be an actual thing in which the representations inhere, or actual things independent of us that produce them, we do not know even the lowliest predicate from the one or the other. All the same, we postulate objects; we speak of our self, we speak of bodies as real things, we believe we are acquainted with both, we make judgments about them. The cause of this is nothing other than the fact that the various appearances have something in common with one another.