Page:Critique of Pure Reason 1855 Meiklejohn tr.djvu/160

to be sought the possibility of synthetical judgments, and as all three contain the sources of à priori representations, the possibility of pure synthetical judgments also; nay, they are necessary upon these grounds, if we are to possess a knowledge of objects, which rests solely upon the synthesis of representations.

If a cognition is to have objective reality, that is, to relate to an object, and possess sense and meaning in respect to it, it is necessary that the object be given in some way or another. Without this, our conceptions are empty, and we may indeed have thought by means of them, but by such thinking, we have not, in fact, cognized anything, we have merely played with representation. To give an object, if this expression be understood in the sense of to present the object, not mediately but immediately in intuition, means nothing else than to apply the representation of it to experience, be that experience real or only possible. Space and time themselves, pure as these conceptions are from all that is empirical, and certain as it is that they are represented fully à priori in the mind, would be completely without objective validity, and without sense and significance, if their necessary use in the objects of experience were not shewn. Nay, the representation of them is a mere schema, that always relates to the reproductive imagination, which calls up the objects of experience, without which they have no meaning. And so is it with all conceptions without distinction.

The possibility of experience is, then, that which gives objective reality to all our à priori cognitions. Now experience depends upon the synthetical unity of phænomena, that is, upon a synthesis according to conceptions of the object of phænomena in general, a synthesis without which experience never could become knowledge, but would be merely a rhapsody of perceptions, never fitting together into any connected text, according to rules of a thoroughly united (possible) consciousness, and therefore never subjected to the transcendental and necessary unity of apperception. Experience has therefore for a foundation, à priori principles of its form, that is to say, general rules of unity in the synthesis of phænomena, the objective reality of which rules, as necessary conditions—even of the possibility of experience—can always be shewn in experience. But apart from this relation, à priori synthetical