Page:Critique of Pure Reason 1855 Meiklejohn tr.djvu/11

The following translation has been undertaken with the hope of rendering Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft intelligible to the English student.

The difficulties which meet the reader and the translator of this celebrated work arise from various causes. Kant was a man of clear, vigorous, and trenchant thought, and, after nearly twelve years’ meditation, could not be in doubt as to his own system. But the Horatian rule of

will not apply to him. He had never studied the art of expression. He wearies by frequent repetitions, and employs a great number of words to express, in the clumsiest way, what could have been enounced more clearly and distinctly in a few. The main statement in his sentences is often overlaid with a multitude of qualifying and explanatory clauses; and the reader is lost in a maze, from which he has great difficulty in extricating himself. There are some passages which have no main verb; others, in which the author loses sight of the subject with which he set out, and concludes with a predicate regarding something else mentioned in the course of his argument. All this can be easily accounted for. Kant, as he mentions in a letter to Lambert, took nearly twelve