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Subject Area: Philosophy
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SUPPLEMENT XIX - 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 XIX

[See page 155]

B. Second Analogy

Principle of the Succession of Time, according to the Law of Causality

All changes take place according to the law of connection between cause and effect.

Proof

(It has been shown by the preceding principle, that all phenomena in the succession of time are changes only, i.e. a successive being and not-being of the determinations of the substance, which is permanent, and consequently that the being of the substance itself, which follows upon its not-being, and its not-being, which follows on its being, — in other words, that an arising or perishing of the substance itself is inadmissible. The same principle might also have been expressed thus: all change (succession) of phenomena consists in modification only, for arising and perishing are no modifications of the substance, because the concept of modification presupposes the same subject as existing with two opposite determinations, and therefore as permanent. After this preliminary remark, we shall proceed to the proof.)

I perceive that phenomena succeed each other, that is, that there is a state of things at one time the opposite of which existed at a previous time. I am therefore really connecting two perceptions in time. That connection is not a work of the senses only and of intuition, but is here the product of a synthetical power of the faculty of imagination, which determines the internal sense with reference to relation in time. Imagination, however, can connect those two states in two ways, so that either the one or the other precedes in time: for time cannot be perceived by itself, nor can we determine in the object empirically and with reference to time, what precedes and what follows. I am, therefore, conscious only that my imagination places the one before, the other after, and not, that in the object the one state comes before the other. In other words, the objective relation of phenomena following upon each other remains undetermined by mere perception. In order that this may be known as determined, it is necessary to conceive the relation between the two states in such a way that it should be determined thereby with necessity, which of the two should be taken as coming first, and which as second, and not conversely. Such a concept, involving a necessity of synthetical unity, can be a pure concept of the understanding only, which is not supplied by experience, and this is, in this case, the concept of the relation of cause and effect, the former determining the latter in time as the consequence, the cause not being something that might be antecedent in imagination only, or might not be perceived at all. Experience itself, therefore, that is, an empirical knowledge of phenomena, is possible only by our subjecting the succession of phenomena, and with it all change, to the law of causality, and phenomena themselves, as objects of experience, are consequently possible according to the same law only.