IMMANUEL KANT: Philosophical Books, Critiques & Essays. Immanuel Kant

in any judgment enounced intellectually is a condition in the absence of which the subject is asserted to be unthinkable, the predicate hence being the principle of cognition, it will, if a sensuous concept, be only the condition of a possible sensuous cognition—and hence will square well enough with the subject of a judgment whose concept is also sensuous. But if it be applied to an intellectual concept, the judgment will be valid only according to subjective laws, and hence must not be affirmed objectively and predicated of the intellectual notion itself, but only as a condition in the absence of which the sensuous cognition of the given concept does not take place.^[8]

      Now, since the tricks of the intellect by the subordination of sensuous concepts as though intellectual marks may be called, analogously to the accepted meaning, a fallacy of subreption, the exchanging of intellectual and sensual concepts will be a metaphysical fallacy of subreption, the intellectualized phenomenon, if the barbarous expression be permissible, and hence I call such a hybrid axiom as palms off the sensuous as necessarily adhering to the intellectual concept, a surreptitious axiom. From these spurious axioms have gone forth, and are rife throughout metaphysics, principles deceiving the intellect. In order that we may have, however, a readily and clearly knowable criterion of those judgments, a touchstone, so to speak, by which to distinguish them from genuine judgments, and at the same time if, perhaps, they seem to cling tenaciously to the intellect, an assaying art by which we can justly estimate how much belongs to the sensuous and how much to the intellectual sphere, I think it necessary to go into the question more deeply.

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      Here, then, is the principle of reduction for any spurious axiom: If concerning any intellectual concept something pertaining to time and space relations be predicated generally, it is not to be enounced objectively, but denotes only the condition without which the given concept is not knowable sensuously. That such an axiom is spurious, and, if not false, at least a rash and question-begging assertion, appears thus: the subject of the judgment being intellectually conceived pertains to the object, whilst the predicate, since it contains the determinations of space and time, pertains only to the conditions of human sensuous cognition, which, not adhering of necessity to any cognition whatsoever of the object, cannot be enounced concerning the given intellectual concept universally. The intellect’s being so readily subject to this fallacy of subreption comes of its being deceived under the plea of another and perfectly true rule. For we rightly suppose that that which can be cognized by no intuition whatever is utterly unthinkable and hence impossible. But since we cannot attain by any mental striving, even fictitiously, to any other intuition but that according to the form of space and time, it happens that we deem all intuition whatever impossible which is not bound by these laws, passing by the pure intellectual intuition exempt from the laws of the senses, such as the divine, by Plato called the Idea, and hence subject all possible given things to the sensual axioms of space and time.

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      All sleights of substitution of sensuous cognition under guise of intellectual concepts, from which spurious axioms originate, can be reduced to three species, whose general formulae are the following:

      1 The sensual condition under which alone the intuition of an object is possible, is the condition of its possibility.

      2 The sensual condition under which alone data can be compared in order to form the intellectual concept of the object, is the condition of the very possibility of the object.

      3 The sensual condition under which alone the subsumption of an object under a given intellectual concept is possible, is the condition of the possibility of the object.

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A spurious axiom of the first class is: Whatever is, is somewhere and sometime.^[9] Now by this spurious principle all beings, even though they be intellectually cognized, are restricted in existence by the conditions of space and time. Hence people discuss all sorts of inane questions, such as concerning the places of immaterial substances—of which, for that very reason, there is no sensuous intuition, nor, under that form, any representation—in the corporeal universe, or the seat of the soul; and as they improperly mix sensual things with intellectual concepts, like square figures with round, it oftens happens that of the disputants one appears as milking a he-goat, and the other as holding the sieve under. The presence of immaterial substances in the corporeal world is virtual, not local, though thus improperly talked about. Space does not contain the conditions of possible mutual activities, except those of matter. What may constitute the external relations of forces in immaterial substances, as well among themselves as toward bodies, altogether escapes the human intellect, as was acutely noted, for instance, in a letter to a German prince by the clear-sighted Euler, otherwise a great investigator and judge of phenomena. But when people have arrived at the concept of a highest and extra-mundane being, they are fooled by these shadows flitting before the intellect to a degree beyond the force of language to express. The presence of God they figure to themselves as a local one, involving God in the world as if also comprised in infinite space, compensating Him for this limitation by a locality, so to speak, eminently conceived, that is, infinite. But it is absolutely impossible to be at the same time in several places, since different places are mutually without each other, and hence what is in several places is outside of itself, which implies being present to itself externally. But as to time, having not only exempted it from the laws of sensual knowledge, but transferred it beyond the limits of the world to the extra-mundane Being Himself as a condition of His existence, they involve themselves in an inextricable labyrinth. Hence they cudgel their brains with absurd questions, such as, for instance, why God did not make the world many centuries earlier. They persuade themselves that it is easy to conceive, to be sure, how God may discern what is present, that is, what is actual in the time in which he is, but how He may foresee what is future, that is, what is actual in the time in which He is not yet, they deem an intellectual difficulty; as if the existence of the Necessary Being descended through all the moments of an imaginary time, and, having already exhausted a part of His duration, saw before Him the eternity He was yet to live simultaneously with the present events of the world. All these difficulties upon proper insight into the notion of time vanish like smoke.

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      The prejudices of the second species, since they impose upon the intellect by the sensual conditions restricting the mind if it wishes in certain cases to attain to what is intellectual, lurk more deeply. One of them is that which affects knowledge of quantity, the other that affecting knowledge of qualities generally. The former is: every actual multiplicity can be given numerically, and hence, every infinite quantity; the latter, whatever is impossible contradicts itself. In either of them the concept of time, it is true, does not enter into the very notion of the predicate, nor is it attributed as a qualification to the subject. But yet it serves as a means for forming an idea of the predicate, and thus, being a condition, affects the intellectual concept of the subject to the extent that the latter is only attained by its aid.

      As to the first, as every quantity and any series whatever are distinctly known only by successive co-ordination, the intellectual concept of amount and multiplicity arises only by the aid of this concept of time, and never attains to completeness unless the synthesis can be gone through with in finite time. It is hence that the infinite series of co-ordinate things cannot be comprehended distinctly according to the limits of our intellect; it hence by the fallacy of subreption seems impossible. According to the laws of pure intellect any series of effects has its principle, that is, there is not given in a series of effects a regress without a limit; whilst according to sensual laws any series of co-ordinate things has its assignable beginning. These propositions, the latter of which involves the mensurability of the series, the former the dependence of the whole, are taken hastily for identical. In the same way, to the argument of the intellect, proving that a substantial composite being given so are the elements of composition, that is, the simple things, there is adjoined a supposititious one suborned from sensual knowledge,