Our task, in this Commentary, is only to distinguish the passages in which those two conflicting tendencies appear, and to trace the consequences which follow from Kant’s alternation between them. Discussion of their significance had best be deferred to the close of the Dialectic, where Kant dwells upon the regulative function of Reason. At present we need merely note that the main content of the above sections, in which the sceptical view is expounded, is of early date, prior to the working out of the Paralogisms and of the Ideal.
SECTION VI
TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM AS THE KEY TO THE SOLUTION OF THE COSMOLOGICAL DIALECTIC[1547]
In this section subjectivism is dominant. The type of transcendental idealism expounded is that earlier and less developed form which connects with the doctrine of the transcendental object.[1548] It shows no trace of Kant’s maturer teaching. No distinction is drawn between representation and the objects represented. To the transcendental object, the “purely intelligible cause” of appearances in general, and to it alone, Kant ascribes “the whole extent and connection of our possible perceptions.”[1549] Appearances exist only in the degree to which they are constructed in experience. As they are mere representations, they cannot exist outside the mind. Independently of such construction, they may indeed be said to be given in the transcendental object, but they only become objects to us on the supposition that they can be reached through extension of the series of our actual perceptions. It is in this form alone, as conceived in a regressive series of possible perceptions, and not as having existed in itself, that even the immemorial past course of the world can be represented as real;
“...so that all events which have taken place in the immense periods that have preceded my own existence mean really nothing but the possibility of extending the chain of experience from the present perception back to the conditions which determine it in time.”[1550]
A similar interpretation has to be given to all propositions which assert the present reality of that which has never been actually experienced.
“In outcome it is a matter of indifference whether I say that in the empirical progress in space I can meet with stars a hundred times farther removed than the outermost now perceptible to me, or whether I say that they are perhaps to be met with in cosmical space even though no human being has ever perceived or ever will perceive them. For even if they were given as things in themselves, without relation to possible experience,[1551] they are still nothing for me, and therefore are not objects, save in so far as they are contained in the series of the empirical regress.”[1552]
The distinction between appearances and things in themselves must always, Kant observes, be borne in mind when we are interpreting the meaning of our empirical concepts; and this is especially necessary when those concepts are brought into connection with the cosmological Idea of an unconditioned. The antinomies are due to a failure to appreciate this fundamental distinction, and the key to their solution lies in its recognition.
“It would be an injustice to ascribe to us that long-decried empirical idealism which, while it admits the genuine actuality of space, denies the existence of the extended beings in it....”[1553]
This is in line with the passages from the Prolegomena commented upon above.[1554]
SECTION VII
CRITICAL DECISION OF THE COSMOLOGICAL CONFLICT OF REASON WITH ITSELF[1555]