in such a manner that if he believes himself fundamentally right, he can remove in time
any stumbling block that might hurt the success of his work.
I find myself, with my reviewer, in quite another position. He seems not to see at
all the real matter of the investigation with which (successfully or unsuccessfully) I
have been occupied. It is either impatience at thinking out a lengthy work, or vexation
at a threatened reform of a science in which he believed he had brought everything to
perfection long ago, or, what I am reluctant to suspect, real narrow-mindedness that pre-
vents him from ever carrying his thoughts beyond his school metaphysics. In short, he
passes impatiently in review a long series of propositions, of which, without knowing
their premises, one can understand nothing, intersperses here and there his censure, the
reason of which the reader understands just as little as the propositions against which it
is directed; and hence [his report] can neither serve the public nor damage me in the
judgment of experts. I should, for these reasons, have passed over this judgment alto-
gether, were it not that it may afford me occasion for some explanations which may in
some cases save the readers of these Prolegomenafrom a misconception.
In order to take a position from which my reviewer could most easily set the
whole work in a most unfavorable light, without venturing to trouble himself with any
special investigation, he begins and ends by saying: “This work is a system of transcen-
dental (or, as he translates it, of higher*) idealism.”
A glance at this line soon showed me the sort of criticism that I had to expect, much
as though the reviewer were one who had never seen or heard of geometry, having found
a Euclid and coming upon various figures in turning over its leaves, were to say, on being
asked his opinion of it: “The work is a textbook of drawing; the author introduces a pecu-
liar terminology, in order to give dark, incomprehensible directions, which in the end
teach nothing more than what everyone can effect by a fair natural accuracy of eye, etc.”
Let us see, in the meantime, what sort of an idealism it is that goes through my
whole work, although it does not by a long way constitute the soul of the system.
The dictum of all genuine idealists, from the Eleatic school to Bishop Berkeley, is
contained in this formula: “All knowledge through the senses and experience is nothing but
sheer illusion, and only in the ideas of the pure understanding and reason is there truth.”
The principle that throughout dominates and determines my idealism, is on the
contrary: “All knowledge of things merely from pure understanding or pure reason is
nothing but sheer illusion, and only in experience is there truth.”
But this is directly contrary to idealism proper. How came I then to use this expres-
sion for quite an opposite purpose, and how came my reviewer to see it everywhere?
The solution of this difficulty rests on something that could have been very easily
understood from the general bearing of the work if the reader had only desired to under-
stand it. Space and time, together with all that they contain, are not things in themselves
or their qualities, but belong merely to the appearances of the things in themselves. Up
to this point I am one in confession with the above idealists. But these, and among them
more particularly Berkeley, regarded space as a mere empirical representation that, like
PROLEGOMENA TOANYFUTUREMETAPHYSICS 845
374*By no means “higher.” High towers and metaphysically great men resembling them, round both of
which there is commonly much wind, are not for me. My place is the fruitful bathos of experience; and the word
“transcendental,” the meaning of which is so often explained by me but not once grasped by my reviewer (so
carelessly has he regarded everything), does not signify something passing beyond all experience but something
that indeed precedes it a priori,but that is intended simply to make knowledge of experience possible. If these
conceptions overstep experience, their employment is termed “transcendent,” which must be distinguished from
the immanent use, that is, use restricted to experience. All misunderstandings of this kind have been sufficiently
guarded against in the work itself, but my reviewer found his advantage in misunderstanding me.