814 IMMANUELKANT
a consciousness, and by which the peculiar way in which we think (namely, by rules) and
hence experience also are possible, but must be clearly distinguished from an insight into the
objects in themselves. This answer is given in the Critiqueitself in the “Transcendental
Logic” and in these Prolegomena,in the course of the solution of the second main problem.
But how this peculiar property of our sensibility itself is possible, or that of our
understanding and of the apperception which is necessarily its basis and that of all
thinking, cannot be further analyzed or answered, because it is of them that we are in
need for all our answers and for all our thinking about objects.
There are many laws of nature which we can know only by means of experience; but
conformity to law in the connection of appearances, that is, in nature in general, we cannot
discover by any experience, because experience itself requires laws which are a prioriat
the basis of its possibility.
The possibility of experience in general is therefore at the same time the universal
law of nature, and the principles of experience are the very laws of nature. For we know
nature only as the totality of appearances, that is, of representations in us; and hence we
can only derive the laws of their connection from the principles of their connection in
us, that is, from the conditions of their necessary union in one consciousness which
constitutes the possibility of experience.
Even the main proposition expounded throughout this section—that universal laws
of nature can be known a priori—leads naturally to the proposition that the highest legis-
lation of nature must lie in ourselves, that is, in our understanding; and that we must not
seek the universal laws of nature in nature by means of experience, but conversely must
seek nature, as to its universal conformity to law, in the conditions of the possibility of
experience which lie in our sensibility and in our understanding. For how were it other-
wise possible to know a priorithese laws, as they are not rules of analytical knowledge
but truly synthetical extensions of it?
Such a necessary agreement of the principles of possible experience with the laws of
the possibility of nature can only proceed from one of two causes: either these laws are
drawn from nature by means of experience, or conversely nature is derived from the laws of
the possibility of experience in general and is quite the same as the mere universal confor-
mity to law of the latter. The former is self-contradictory, for the universal laws of nature can
and must be known a priori(that is, independently of all experience) and be the foundation
of all empirical use of the understanding; the latter alternative therefore alone remains.*
But we must distinguish the empirical laws of nature, which always presuppose
particular perceptions, from the pure or universal laws of nature, which, without being
based on particular perceptions, contain merely the conditions of their necessary union
in experience. In relation to the latter, nature and possible experience are quite the same;
and as the conformity to law in the latter depends upon the necessary connection of
appearances in experience (without which we cannot know any object whatever in the
sensible world), consequently upon the original laws of the understanding, it seems at
first strange, but is not the less certain, to say:The understanding does not derive its
laws(a priori) from, but prescribes them to, nature.
§ 37. We shall illustrate this seemingly bold proposition by an example, which
will show that laws which we discover in objects of sensuous intuition (especially when320
*Crusius alone thought of a compromise: that a spirit, who can neither err nor deceive, implanted
these laws in us originally. But since false principles often intrude themselves, as indeed the very system of
this man shows in not a few instances, we are involved in difficulties as to the use of such a principle in the
absence of sure criteria to distinguish the genuine origin from the spurious, since we never can know certainly
what the spirit of truth or the father of lies may have instilled into us.319