Prolegomena to any future metaphysics

the understanding as close as possible to the completeness that this idea

signifies.

§45
Preliminary Remark
On the Dialectic of Pure Reason
We have shown above (§§33, 34): that the purity of the categories from
all admixture with sensory determinations can mislead reason into ex-
tending their use entirely beyond all experience to things in themselves;
and yet, because the categories are themselves unable to find any in-
tuition that could provide them with significance and sense in concreto,
they cannot in and of themselves provide any determinate concept of
anything at all, though they can indeed, as mere logical functions, rep-
resent a thing in general. Now hyperbolical objects of this kind are what
are called noumena or pure beings of the understanding (better: beings
of thought)a – such as, e.g., substance, but which is thought without persis-
tence in time, or a cause, which would however not act in time, and so on –
because such predicates are attributed to these objects as serve only to
make the lawfulness of experience possible, and yet they are nonetheless
deprived of all the conditions of intuition under which alone experi-
ence is possible, as a result of which the above concepts again lose all
significance.
There is, however, no danger that the understanding will of itself
wantonly stray beyond its boundaries into the field of mere beings of
thought, without being urged by alien laws. But if reason, which can
never be fully satisfied with any use of the rules of the understanding in
experience because such use is always still conditioned, requires com-
pletion of this chain of conditions, then the understanding is driven out
of its circle, in order partly to represent the objects of experience in a
4: 333 series stretching so far that no experience can comprise the likes of it,
partly (in order to complete the series) even to look for noumena entirely
outside said experience to which reason can attach the chain and in that
way, independent at last of the conditions of experience, nonetheless can
make its hold complete. These then are the transcendental ideas, which,
although in accordance with the true but hidden end of the natural deter-
mination of our reason they may be aimed not at overreaching concepts
but merely at the unbounded expansion of the use of concepts in experi-
ence, may nonetheless, through an unavoidable illusion, elicit from the
understanding a transcendent use, which, though deceitful, nonetheless
cannot be curbed by any resolve to stay within the bounds of experience,
but only through scientific instruction and hard work.

a Gedankenwesen, contrasted with the just previous Verstandeswesen.

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§46
I. Psychological ideas (Critique, pp. 341ff.)69
It has long been observed that in all substances the true subject – namely
that which remains after all accidents (as predicates) have been removed –
and hence the substantial itself, is unknown to us; and various complaints
have been made about these limits to our insight. But it needs to be said
that human understanding is not to be blamed because it does not know
the substantial in things, i.e., cannot determine it by itself, but rather
because it wants to cognize determinately, like an object that is given,
what is only an idea. Pure reason demands that for each predicate of a
thing we should seek its appropriate subject, but that for this subject,
which is in turn necessarily only a predicate, we should seek its subject
again, and so forth to infinity (or as far as we get). But from this it
follows that we should take nothing that we can attain for a final subject,
and that the substantial itself could never be thought by our ever-so-
deeply penetrating understanding, even if the whole of nature were laid
bare before it; for the specific nature of our understanding consists in
thinking everything discursively, i.e., through concepts, hence through
mere predicates, among which the absolute subject must therefore always
be absent. Consequently, all real properties by which we cognize bodies
are mere accidents for which we lack a subject – even impenetrability, 4: 334
which must always be conceived only as the effect of a force.
Now it does appear as if we have something substantial in the con-
sciousness of ourselves (i.e., in the thinking subject), and indeed have it
in immediate intuition; for all the predicates of inner sense are referred
to the I as subject, and this I cannot again be thought as the predicate of
some other subject. It therefore appears that in this case completeness in
referring the given concepts to a subject as predicates is not a mere idea,
but that the object, namely the absolute subject itself, is given in experi-
ence. But this expectation is disappointed. For the I is not a concept∗ at
all, but only a designation of the object of inner sense insofar as we do
not further cognize it through any predicate; hence although it cannot
itself be the predicate of any other thing, just as little can it be a deter-
minate concept of an absolute subject, but as in all the other cases it can
only be the referring of inner appearances to their unknown subject.

∗
If the representation of apperception, the I, were a concept through which
anything might be thought, it could then be used as a predicate for other
things, or contain such predicates in itself. But it is nothing more than a feeling
of an existence without the least concept, and is only a representation of that
to which all thinking stands in relation (relatione accidentis).a

a “relation of accident”

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Nevertheless, through a wholly natural misunderstanding, this idea

(which, as a regulative principle, serves perfectly well to destroy com-
pletely all materialistic explanations of the inner appearances of our
soul)a gives rise to a seemingly plausible argument for inferring the
nature of our thinking being from this presumed cognition of the sub-
stantial in it, inasmuch as knowledge of its nature falls completely outside
the sum total of experience.

§47
This thinking self (the soul), as the ultimate subject of thinking, which
cannot itself be represented as the predicate of another thing, may now
indeed be called substance: but this concept nonetheless remains com-
pletely empty and without any consequences, if persistence (as that which
renders the concept of substances fertile within experience) cannot be
proven of it.
4: 335 Persistence, however, can never be proven from the concept of a
substance as a thing in itself, but only for the purposes of experience.
This has been sufficiently established in the first Analogy of Experience
(Critique, p. 182);70 and anyone who will not grant this proof can test for
themselves whether they succeed in proving, from the concept of a sub-
ject that does not exist as the predicate of another thing, that the existence
of that subject is persistent throughout, and that it can neither come into
being nor pass away, either in itself or through any natural cause. Syn-
thetic a priori propositions of this type can never be proven in themselves,
but only in relation to things as objects of a possible experience.

§48
If, therefore, we want to infer the persistence of the soul from the concept
of the soul as substance, this can be valid of the soul only for the purpose of
possible experience, and not of the soul as a thing in itself and beyond all
possible experience. But life is the subjective condition of all our possible
experience: consequently, only the persistence of the soul during life can
be inferred, for the death of a human being is the end of all experience
as far as the soul as an object of experience is concerned (provided that
the opposite has not been proven, which is the very matter in question).
Therefore the persistence of the soul can be proven only during the life
of a human being (which proof will doubtless be granted us), but not
after death (which is actually our concern) – and indeed then only from
the universal ground that the concept of substance, insofar as it is to
be considered as connected necessarily with the concept of persistence,

a The original has an asterisk here, with no corresponding note.

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