Page:Kant's Prolegomena etc (1883).djvu/131
but I flatter myself I might have rendered my style popular, if I had only had to sketch a plan, and to leave its completion to others, and not had the well-being of the science, with which I had been so long occupied, so much at heart; for it requires considerable endurance and not a little self-denial to choose a late but enduring fame, in preference to the allurement of a speedy and favourable reception.
Plan-making is often a luxurious and pretentious mental occupation, whereby the reputation of a creative genius is acquired by demanding what one cannot achieve oneself, censuring what one cannot improve, and proposing what one does not know where to find. But to a thorough plan of the general Critique of the Reason something more is necessary, as may be well supposed, if it is not to be, as usual, a mere declamation of pious wishes. For pure Reason is so isolated, and in itself so intimately connected a sphere, that no part of it can be touched upon without affecting the rest. We can accomplish nothing, therefore, without determining the position and influence of each part with regard to the others, because there is nothing external to it by which our judgment can be corrected as to its inner character. The validity and use of every part depends upon the relations in which it stands toward the rest within the Reason, and as in the construction of an organised body, the purpose of each member can only be deduced from a complete conception of the whole. It may therefore be said of such a critique that it is never reliable, unless it be quite complete, down to the least of the elements of pure Reason; and that in the sphere of this faculty, one must determine and expound either everything or nothing.
Yet although a mere plan, if it preceded the critique, would be incomprehensible, unreliable and useless, it is so much the more useful when it follows it. For one is then in a position to view the whole, to test the main points upon which the science rests piecemeal, and to render the style better than was possible on the first execution of the work.
The following is such a plan, which as the work is complete may be presented in an analytical manner,