BOOK I. The Concepts of Pure Reason[1381]

THE CONCEPTS OF PURE REASON

The distinction here drawn between concepts obtained by reflection and concepts gained by inference is a somewhat misleading mode of stating the fact that, whereas the categories of understanding condition experience and so make possible the unity of consciousness necessary to all reflection, or, in other words, are conditions of the material supplied for inference, the concepts of Reason are Ideal constructions which though in a certain sense resting upon experience none the less transcend it. The function of the Ideas is to organise experience in its totality; that of the categories is to render possible the sense-perceptions constitutive of its content. The former refer to the unconditioned, and though that is a conception under which everything experienced is conceived to fall, it represents a type of knowledge to which no actual experience can ever be adequate.

=Conceptus ratiocinati--conceptus ratiocinantes.= When such transcendent concepts possess “objective validity,” they are correctly inferred, and may be entitled conceptus ratiocinati. If, on the other hand, they are due to merely sophistical reasoning, they are purely fictitious, conceptus ratiocinantes. This distinction raises many difficulties. Kant’s intention cannot be to deny that the conceptus ratiocinati are “mere Ideas” (entia rationis)--for such is his avowed and constant contention--or that the inference to them is dialectical and is based upon a transcendental illusion. Two alternatives are open. He may mean that they are only valid when the results of such inference are Critically reinterpreted, and when the function of the Ideas is realised to be merely regulative; or his intention may be to mark off the Ideas, strictly so-called, which are inevitable and beneficial products of Reason, from the many idle and superfluous inventions of speculative thought. Kant’s concluding remark, that the questions at issue can be adequately discussed only at a later stage, may be taken as in the nature of an apology for the looseness of these preliminary statements, and as a warning to the reader not to insist upon them too absolutely. The participles ratiocinati and ratiocinantes are of doubtful latinity. The distinction of meaning here imposed upon them has not been traced in any other writer, and is perhaps Kant’s own invention.