| SECTION VI. Transcendental Idealism as the Key to the Solution of Pure Cosmological Dialectic. |
| In the transcendental aesthetic we proved that everything intuited in space and time, all objects of a possible experience, are nothing but phenomena, that is, mere representations; and that these, as presented to us--as extended bodies, or as series of changes--have no self-subsistent existence apart from human thought. |
| This doctrine I call Transcendental Idealism.* The realist in the transcendental sense regards these modifications of our sensibility, these mere representations, as things subsisting in themselves. |
| [*Footnote; I have elsewhere termed this theory formal idealism, to distinguish it from material idealism, which doubts or denies the existence of external things. |
| To avoid ambiguity, it seems advisable in many cases to employ this term instead of that mentioned in the text.] |
| It would be unjust to accuse us of holding the long-decried theory of empirical idealism, which, while admitting the reality of space, denies, or at least doubts, the existence of bodies extended in it, and thus leaves us without a sufficient criterion of reality and illusion. |
| The supporters of this theory find no difficulty in admitting the reality of the phenomena of the internal sense in time; nay, they go the length of maintaining that this internal experience is of itself a sufficient proof of the real existence of its object as a thing in itself. |
| Transcendental idealism allows that the objects of external intuition--as intuited in space, and all changes in time--as represented by the internal sense, are real. |
| For, as space is the form of that intuition which we call external, and, without objects in space, no empirical representation could be given us, we can and ought to regard extended bodies in it as real. |
| The case is the same with representations in time. |
| But time and space, with all phenomena therein, are not in themselves things. |
| They are nothing but representations and cannot exist out of and apart from the mind. |
| Nay, the sensuous internal intuition of the mind (as the object of consciousness), the determination of which is represented by the succession of different states in time, is not the real, proper self, as it exists in itself--not the transcendental subject--but only a phenomenon, which is presented to the sensibility of this, to us, unknown being. |
| This internal phenomenon cannot be admitted to be a self-subsisting thing; for its condition is time, and time cannot be the condition of a thing in itself. |
| But the empirical truth of phenomena in space and time is guaranteed beyond the possibility of doubt, and sufficiently distinguished from the illusion of dreams or fancy--although both have a proper and thorough connection in an experience according to empirical laws. |
| The objects of experience then are not things in themselves, but are given only in experience, and have no existence apart from and independently of experience. |
| That there may be inhabitants in the moon, although no one has ever observed them, must certainly be admitted; but this assertion means only, that we may in the possible progress of experience discover them at some future time. |
| For that which stands in connection with a perception according to the laws of the progress of experience is real. |
| They are therefore really existent, if they stand in empirical connection with my actual or real consciousness, although they are not in themselves real, that is, apart from the progress of experience. |
| There is nothing actually given--we can be conscious of nothing as real, except a perception and the empirical progression from it to other possible perceptions. |
| For phenomena, as mere representations, are real only in perception; and perception is, in fact, nothing but the reality of an empirical representation, that is, a phenomenon. |