| From these elements originate all the conceptions of pure psychology, by combination alone, without the aid of any other principle. |
| This substance, merely as an object of the internal sense, gives the conception of Immateriality; as simple substance, that of Incorruptibility; its identity, as intellectual substance, gives the conception of Personality; all these three together, Spirituality. |
| Its relation to objects in space gives us the conception of connection (commercium) with bodies. |
| Thus it represents thinking substance as the principle of life in matter, that is, as a soul (anima), and as the ground of Animality; and this, limited and determined by the conception of spirituality, gives us that of Immortality. |
| Now to these conceptions relate four paralogisms of a transcendental psychology, which is falsely held to be a science of pure reason. |
| touching the nature of our thinking being. |
| We can, however, lay at the foundation of this science nothing but the simple and in itself perfectly contentless representation "I" which cannot even be called a conception, but merely a consciousness which accompanies all conceptions. |
| By this "I," or "He," or "It," who or which thinks, nothing more is represented than a transcendental subject of thought = x, which is cognized only by means of the thoughts that are its predicates, and of which, apart from these, we cannot form the least conception. |
| Hence in a perpetual circle, inasmuch as we must always employ it, in order to frame any judgement respecting it. |
| And this inconvenience we find it impossible to rid ourselves of, because consciousness in itself is not so much a representation distinguishing a particular object, as a form of representation in general, in so far as it may be termed cognition; for in and by cognition alone do I think anything. |
| It must, however, appear extraordinary at first sight that the condition under which I think, and which is consequently a property of my subject, should be held to be likewise valid for every existence which thinks, and that we can presume to base upon a seemingly empirical proposition a judgement which is apodeictic and universal, to wit, that everything which thinks is constituted as the voice of my consciousness declares it to be, that is, as a self-conscious being. |
| The cause of this belief is to be found in the fact that we necessarily attribute to things a priori all the properties which constitute conditions under which alone we can cogitate them. |
| Now I cannot obtain the least representation of a thinking being by means of external experience, but solely through self-consciousness. |
| Such objects are consequently nothing more than the transference of this consciousness of mine to other things which can only thus be represented as thinking beings. |
| The proposition, "I think," is, in the present case, understood in a problematical sense, not in so far as it contains a perception of an existence (like the Cartesian "Cogito, ergo sum"),[Footnote; "I think, therefore I am."] but in regard to its mere possibility--for the purpose of discovering what properties may be inferred from so simple a proposition and predicated of the subject of it. |
| If at the foundation of our pure rational cognition of thinking beings there lay more than the mere Cogito--if we could likewise call in aid observations on the play of our thoughts, and the thence derived natural laws of the thinking self, there would arise an empirical psychology which would be a kind of physiology of the internal sense and might possibly be capable of explaining the phenomena of that sense. |
| But it could never be available for discovering those properties which do not belong to possible experience (such as the quality of simplicity), nor could it make any apodeictic enunciation on the nature of thinking beings; it would therefore not be a rational psychology. |
| Now, as the proposition "I think" (in the problematical sense) contains the form of every judgement in general and is the constant accompaniment of all the categories, it is manifest that conclusions are drawn from it only by a transcendental employment of the understanding. |
| This use of the understanding excludes all empirical elements; and we cannot, as has been shown above, have any favourable conception beforehand of its procedure. |
| We shall therefore follow with a critical eye this proposition through all the predicaments of pure psychology; but we shall, for brevity's sake, allow this examination to proceed in an uninterrupted connection. |
| Before entering on this task, however, the following general remark may help to quicken our attention to this mode of argument. |