832 IMMANUELKANT
determine anything in this way, since time, space, and all the concepts of the under-
standing, and still more all the concepts formed by empirical intuition (perception) in the
sensible world, have and can have no other use than to make experience possible? And if
this condition is omitted from the pure concepts of the understanding, they do not
determine any object and have no meaning whatever.
But it would be, on the other hand, a still greater absurdity if we conceded no
things in themselves or set up our experience as the only possible mode of knowing
things, our intuition of them in space and in time for the only possible intuition and our
discursive understanding for the archetype of every possible understanding; for this
would be to wish to have the principles of the possibility of experience considered uni-
versal conditions of things in themselves.
Our principles, which limit the use of reason to possible experience, might in this
way become transcendent and the limits of our reason be set up as limits of the possi-
bility of things in themselves (as Hume’s Dialoguesmay illustrate) if a careful critique
351
A drawing from Andreas Cellarius’
Harmonia Macrocosmica(1661)
with some of the greatest names of
astronomy and cosmology, including
(from left to right): Tycho Brahe
(1546–1601), Ptolemy (fl. A.D. 130),
St. Augustine (A.D. 354–430),
Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543),
Galileo Galilei (with pointer)
(1564–1642), and Andreas Cellarius
(seated at right). (Library of Congress)
