seems to be the correct reading, but it may be a mere misprint. -
- Ed.]
38 There is, e.g., an analogy between the juridical relation of
human actions and the mechanical relation of motive powers. I
never can do anything to an. other man without giving him a right
to do the same to me on the same conditions; just as no mass can
act with its motive power on another mass without thereby
occasioning the other to react equally against it. Here right and
motive power are quite dissimilar things, but in their relation
there is complete similarity. By means of such an analogy I can
obtain a notion of the relation of things which absolutely are
unknown to me. For instance, as the promotion of the welfare of
children (= a) is to the love of parents (= b), so the welfare of
the human species (= c) is to that unknown [quantity which is] in
God (= x), which we call love; not as if it had the least
similarity to any human inclination, but because we can suppose
its relation to the world to be similar to that which things of
the world bear one another. But the concept of relation in this
case is a mere category, viz., the concept of cause, which has
nothing to do with sensibility.
39 I may say, that the causality of the Supreme Cause holds the
same place with regard to the world that human reason does with
regard to its works of art. Here the nature of the Supreme Cause
itself remains unknown to me: I only compare its effects (the
order of the world) which I know, and their conformity to reason,
to the effects of human reason which I also know; and hence I
term the former reason, without attributing to it on that account
what I understand in man by this term, or attaching to it
anything else known to me, as its property.
40 Critique Pure Reason, II., chap. 3, section 7.
41 Throughout in the Critique I never lost sight of the plan not
to neglect anything, were it ever so recondite, that could render
the inquiry into the nature of pure reason complete. Everybody
may afterwards carry his researches as far as he pleases, when he
has been merely shown what yet remains to be done. It is this a
duty which must reasonably be expected of him who has made it his
business to survey the whole field, in order to consign it to
others for future cultivation and allotment. And to this branch
both the scholia belong, which will hardly recommend themselves
by their dryness to amateurs, and hence are added here for
connoisseurs only.
42 By no means "higher." High towers, and metaphysically-great
man resembling them, round both of which there is commonly much
wind, are not for me. My place is the fruitful bathos, the
bottom-land, of experience; and the word transcendental, the
meaning of which is so often explained by me but not once grasped
by my reviewer (so carelessly has he regarded everything), does
not signify something passing beyond all experience, but some.
thing that indeed precedes it a priori, but that is intended
simply to make cognition of experience possible. If these
conceptions overstep experience, their employment is termed
transcendent, a word which must be distinguished from
transcendental, the latter being limited to the immanent use,
that is, to experience. All misunderstandings of this kind have
been sufficiently guarded against in the work itself, but my
reviewer found his advantage in misunderstanding me.
43 Idealism proper always has a mystical tendency, and can have
no other, but mine is solely designed for the purpose of
comprehending the possibility of our cognition a priori as to
objects of experience, which is a problem never hitherto solved
or even suggested. In this way all mystical idealism falls to the
ground, for (as may be seen already in Plato) it inferred from
our cognitions a priori (even from those of geometry) another
intuition different from that of the senses (namely, an
intellectual intuition), because it never occurred to any one
that the senses themselves might intuit a priori.
44 The reviewer often fights with his own shadow. When I oppose
the truth of experience to dream, he never thinks that I am here
speaking simply of the well-known somnio objective sumto of the
Wolffian philosophy, which is merely formal, and with which the
distinction between sleeping and waking is in no way concerned,
and in a transcendental philosophy indeed can have no place. For
the rest, he calls my deduction of the categories and table of
the principles of the understanding," common well-known axioms of
logic and ontology, expressed in an idealistic manner." The
reader need only consult these Prolegomena upon this point, to
convince himself that a more miserable and historically
incorrect, judgment, could hardly be made.
45 [Kant rewrote these sections in the second edition of the
Critique.]