800 IMMANUELKANT
294
that they are rather the only means of preventing the transcendental illusion, by
which metaphysics has hitherto been deceived and led to the childish endeavor of
catching at bubbles, because appearances, which are mere representations, were
taken for things in themselves. Here originated the remarkable occurrence of the
antinomy of reason which I shall mention later and which is solved by the single
observation that appearance, as long as it is employed in experience, produces truth;
but the moment it transgresses the bounds of experience, and consequently becomes
transcendent, produces nothing but illusion.
Inasmuch, therefore, as I leave to things as we obtain them by the senses their
actuality and only limit our sensuous intuition of these things to this: that it represents
in no respect, not even in the pure intuitions of space and of time, anything more than
mere appearance of those things, but never their constitution in themselves, this is not a
sweeping illusion invented for nature by me. My protestation, too, against all charges of
idealism is so valid and clear as even to seem superfluous, were there not incompetent
judges who, while they would have an old name for every deviation from their perverse
though common opinion and never judge of the spirit of philosophic nomenclature, but
cling to the letter only, are ready to put their own conceits in the place of well-defined
notions, and thereby deform and distort them. I have myself given this my theory the
name of transcendental idealism, but that cannot authorize anyone to confound it either
with the empirical idealism of Descartes (indeed, his was only an insoluble problem,
owing to which he thought everyone at liberty to deny the existence of the corporeal
world because it could never be proved satisfactorily), or with the mystical and vision-
ary idealism of Berkeley, against which and other similar phantasms our Critique
contains the proper antidote. My idealism concerns not the existence of things (the
doubting of which, however, constitutes idealism in the ordinary sense), since it never
came into my head to doubt it, but it concerns the sensuous representation of things to
which space and time especially belong. Of these [namely, space and time], conse-
quently of all appearances in general, I have only shown that they are neither things (but
mere modes of representation) nor determinations belonging to things in themselves.
But the word “transcendental,” which with me never means a reference of our knowl-
edge to things, but only to the cognitive faculty, was meant to obviate this miscon-
ception. Yet rather than give further occasion to it by this word, I now retract it and
desire this idealism of mine to be called “critical.” But if it be really an objectionable
idealism to convert actual things (not appearances) into mere representations, by what
name shall we call him who conversely changes mere representations to things? It may,
I think, be called “dreaming idealism,” in contradistinction to the former, which may be
called “visionary,” both of which are to be refuted by my transcendental or, better,
criticalidealism.SECONDPART OF THEMAINTRANSCENDENTALPROBLEM
HOWISPURESCIENCE OFNATUREPOSSIBLE?
§ 14. Nature is the existence of things, so far as it is determined according to uni-
versal laws. Should nature signify the existence of things in themselves, we could never
know it either a priorior a posteriori.Not a priori,for how can we know what belongs293