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Subject Area: Philosophy
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I: Of the Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition - Friedrich Max Müller, Critique of Pure Reason [1881]

Edition used:

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In Commemoration of the Centenary of its First Publication. Translated into English by F. Max Mueller (2nd revised ed.) (New York: Macmillan, 1922).

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I

Of the Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition

Whatever the origin of our representations may be, whether they be due to the influence of external things or to internal causes, whether they have arisen a priori or empirically as phenomena, as modifications of the mind they must always belong to the internal [p. 99] sense, and all our knowledge must therefore finally be subject to the formal condition of that internal sense, namely, time, in which they are all arranged, joined, and brought into certain relations to each other. This is a general remark which must never be forgotten in all that follows.

Every representation contains something manifold, which could not be represented as such, unless the mind distinguished the time in the succession of one impression after another; for as contained in one moment, each representation can never be anything but absolute unity. In order to change this manifold into a unity of intuition (as, for instance, in the representation of space), it is necessary first to run through the manifold and then to hold it together. It is this act which I call the synthesis of apprehension, because it refers directly to intuition which no doubt offers something manifold, but which, without a synthesis, can never make it such, as it is contained in one representation.

This synthesis of apprehension must itself be carried out a priori also, that is, with reference to representations which are not empirical. For without it we should never be able to have the representations either of space or time a priori, because these cannot be produced except [p. 100] by a synthesis of the manifold which the senses offer in their original receptivity. It follows therefore that we have a pure synthesis of apprehension.