| In order to effect our purpose, it is necessary; (1) That the conceptions be pure and not empirical; (2) That they belong not to intuition and sensibility, but to thought and understanding; (3) That they be elementary conceptions, and as such, quite different from deduced or compound conceptions; (4) That our table of these elementary conceptions be complete, and fill up the whole sphere of the pure understanding. |
| Now this completeness of a science cannot be accepted with confidence on the guarantee of a mere estimate of its existence in an aggregate formed only by means of repeated experiments and attempts. |
| The completeness which we require is possible only by means of an idea of the totality of the a priori cognition of the understanding, and through the thereby determined division of the conceptions which form the said whole; consequently, only by means of their connection in a system. |
| Pure understanding distinguishes itself not merely from everything empirical, but also completely from all sensibility. |
| It is a unity self-subsistent, self-sufficient, and not to be enlarged by any additions from without. |
| Hence the sum of its cognition constitutes a system to be determined by and comprised under an idea; and the completeness and articulation of this system can at the same time serve as a test of the correctness and genuineness of all the parts of cognition that belong to it. |
| The whole of this part of transcendental logic consists of two books, of which the one contains the conceptions, and the other the principles of pure understanding. |
| BOOK I. SS 2. Analytic of Conceptions. |
| By the term Analytic of Conceptions, I do not understand the analysis of these, or the usual process in philosophical investigations of dissecting the conceptions which present themselves, according to their content, and so making them clear; but I mean the hitherto little attempted dissection of the faculty of understanding itself, in order to investigate the possibility of conceptions a priori, by looking for them in the understanding alone, as their birthplace, and analysing the pure use of this faculty. |
| For this is the proper duty of a transcendental philosophy; what remains is the logical treatment of the conceptions in philosophy in general. |
| We shall therefore follow up the pure conceptions even to their germs and beginnings in the human understanding, in which they lie, until they are developed on occasions presented by experience, and, freed by the same understanding from the empirical conditions attaching to them, are set forth in their unalloyed purity. |
| CHAPTER I. Of the Transcendental Clue to the Discovery of all Pure Conceptions of the Understanding. |
| SS 3. Introductory. |
| When we call into play a faculty of cognition, different conceptions manifest themselves according to the different circumstances, and make known this faculty, and assemble themselves into a more or less extensive collection, according to the time or penetration that has been applied to the consideration of them. |
| Where this process, conducted as it is mechanically, so to speak, will end, cannot be determined with certainty. |
| Besides, the conceptions which we discover in this haphazard manner present themselves by no means in order and systematic unity, but are at last coupled together only according to resemblances to each other, and arranged in series, according to the quantity of their content, from the simpler to the more complex--series which are anything but systematic, though not altogether without a certain kind of method in their construction. |
| Transcendental philosophy has the advantage, and moreover the duty, of searching for its conceptions according to a principle; because these conceptions spring pure and unmixed out of the understanding as an absolute unity, and therefore must be connected with each other according to one conception or idea. |
| A connection of this kind, however, furnishes us with a ready prepared rule, by which its proper place may be assigned to every pure conception of the understanding, and the completeness of the system of all be determined a priori--both which would otherwise have been dependent on mere choice or chance. |
| SS 4. SECTION 1. Of defined above Use of understanding in General. |
| The understanding was defined above only negatively, as a non-sensuous faculty of cognition. |
| Now, independently of sensibility, we cannot possibly have any intuition; consequently, the understanding is no faculty of intuition. |