198 GERMAN rHILOSOPIIV. 



things. These are not and cannot be other than what we can know, 

 that is, affirm or judge of things. All notions, therefore, must be refer- 

 able to one or the other of these categories of judgements. 



We remark here, what has already been remarked elsewhere, that 

 this enumeration is taken for granted but not demonstrated, and that the 

 reason of no part is here given. 



These notions, or pure judgements can be transferred into certain 

 universal judgements ; upon tliis condition solely do the objects of per- 

 ception appear to us possible. These judgements are the ultimate prin- 

 ciples of the pure understanding, or axioms of the understanding. They 

 are pure, they are a priori ; for they do not depend upon any experi- 

 ence, being as the laws of the possible experience \ laws that are in us, 

 since experience itself is entirely ours. Thus the understanding, like 

 the sensibility, has nothing that is invariable or universal except subjec- 

 tive forms, that is, forms that are necessary to the subject that under- 

 stands and perceives, to the intelligent and sensible me. 



Reason rules the understanding, and transforms into absolute princi- 

 ples the intuitions and notions, or rather, subjects all those intuitions and 

 all those notions to certain principles which appertain to it, and which 

 it finds within itself, or which appear to be its proper laws. Yet, all 

 absolute as they are, these principles are contradictory, or at least pure 

 dialectics which has established them theoretically, has established them 

 as directly opposed to each other. The reason, that faculty of rules, 

 that faculty of the absolute, is full of antinomies. It suggests specula- 

 tively insoluble questions. To all the essential points of the rational 

 sciences it opposes contradictories. Meanwhile it raises itself in every- 

 thing to a certain ideal that pleases it, of whose possibility it is satisfied, 

 although it cannot objectively legitimate (or give a clear demonstration 

 of) real existence. 



Above all exists a moral ideal of which the authority is absolute. 

 The good or the evil in our sentiments and in our actions only exists 

 for the reason, the obligation which results being in no sense a physical 

 necessity, but purely moial ; in other terms, the conception of duty ex- 

 isting only for the conscience and for the will, we can comprehend that 

 in morality the subjective is confounded with the objective, and that it 

 is sufficient for the law of duty to impose itself upon tiie me as a neces- 

 sity relative to it, in order that it may become an absolute necessity. 

 Thus the theoretical principles of the practical reason are invested with 

 plenary authority both of fact and of reason, and communicate a part of 

 that authority to notions which are their consequences or their logical 

 conditions. The funduinenial truths of all religion which cannot be de- 



