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Subject Area: Philosophy
Collection: Banned Books

SUPPLEMENT XXVI - 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 XXVI

[See page 274]

Metaphysic has for the real object of its investigations three ideas only, God, Freedom, and Immortality; the second concept connected with the first leading by necessity to the third as conclusion. Everything else treated by that science is a means only in order to establish those ideas and their reality. Metaphysic does not require these ideas for the sake of natural science; but in order to go beyond nature. A right insight into them would make theology, morality, and, by the union of both, religion also, therefore the highest objects of our existence, dependent on the speculative faculty of reason only, and on nothing else. In a systematical arrangement of those ideas the above order, being synthetical, would be the most appropriate; but in their elaboration, which must necessarily come first, the analytical or inverse order is more practical, enabling us, by starting from what is given us by experience, namely, the study of the soul (psychology), and proceeding thence to the study of the world (cosmology), and lastly, to a knowledge of God (theology), to carry out the whole of our great plan in its entirety.