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Subject Area: Philosophy
Collection: Banned Books

SUPPLEMENT XVIII - 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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SUPPLEMENT XVIII

[See page 149]

A. First Analogy

Principle of the Permanence of Substance

In all changes of phenomena the substance is permanent, and its quantum is neither increased nor diminished in nature.

Proof

All phenomena exist in time, and in it alone, as the substratum (as permanent form of the internal intuition), can simultaneousness as well as succession be represented. Time, therefore, in which all change of phenomena is to be thought, does not change, for it is that in which simultaneousness and succession can be represented only as determinations of it. As time by itself cannot be perceived, it follows that the substratum which represents time in general, and in which all change or simultaneousness can be perceived in apprehension, through the relation of phenomena to it, must exist in the objects of perception, that is, in the phenomena. Now the substratum of all that is real, that is, of all that belongs to the existence of things, is the substance, and all that belongs to existence can be conceived only as a determination of it. Consequently the permanent, in reference to which alone all temporal relations of phenomena can be determined, is the substance in phenomena, that is, what is real in them, and, as the substratum of all change, remains always the same. As therefore substance cannot change in existence, we were justified in saying that its quantum can neither be increased nor diminished in nature.