838 IMMANUELKANT
possible experience,” this other principle, which he quite overlooked, “not to consider
the field of experience as one which bounds itself in the eyes of our reason.” The
Critique of Pure Reasonhere points out the true mean between dogmatism, which
Hume combats, and skepticism, which he would substitute for it—a mean which is
not like others that we find advisable to determine for ourselves, as it were mechani-
cally (by adopting something from one side and something from the other), and by
which nobody is taught a better way, but such a one as can be precisely determined on
principles.
§ 59. At the beginning of this note I made use of the metaphor of a boundary, in
order to establish the limits of reason in regard to its suitable use. The world of sense
contains merely appearances, which are not things in themselves; but the understand-
ing, because it recognizes that the objects of experience are mere appearances, must
assume that there are things in themselves, namely,noumena.In our reason both are
comprehended, and the question is, How does reason proceed to set boundaries to the
understanding as regards both these fields? Experience, which contains all that belongs
to the sensible world, does not bound itself; it only proceeds in every case from the
conditioned to some other equally conditioned object. That which bounds it must lie
quite without it, and this is the field of the pure beings of the understanding. But this
field, so far as the determinationof the nature of these beings is concerned, is an empty
space for us; and apart from dogmatically defined concepts, we cannot pass beyond the
field of possible experience. But as a boundary itself is something positive, which
belongs to that which lies within as well as to the space that lies without the given
content, it is still an actual positive cognition which reason only acquires by enlarging
itself to this boundary, yet without attempting to pass it because it there finds itself in
the presence of an empty space in which it can conceive forms of things, but not things
themselves. But the setting of a boundary to the field of the understanding by something
which is otherwise unknown to it is still a cognition which belongs to reason even at this
point, and by which it is neither confined within the sensible nor strays beyond it, but
only limits itself, as befits the knowledge of a boundary, to the relation between that
which lies beyond it and that which is contained within it.
Natural theology is such a concept at the boundary of human reason, being
constrained to look beyond this boundary to the Idea of a Supreme Being (and, for practi-
cal purposes, to that of an intelligible world also), not in order to determine anything rela-
tively to this pure being of the understanding, and thus to determine something that lies
beyond the world of sense, but in order to guide the use of reason within it according to
principles of the greatest possible (theoretical as well as practical) unity. For this purpose,
it makes use of the reference of the world of sense to an independent reason as the cause
of all its connections. Thereby it does not just inventa being, but, as beyond the sensible
world there must be something that can be thought only by the pure understanding, it
determines that something in this particular way, though only of course by analogy.
And thus there remains our original proposition, which is the résuméof the whole
Critique:“Reason by all its a prioriprinciples never teaches us anything more than
objects of possible experience, and even of these nothing more than can be known in
experience.” But this limitation does not prevent reason from leading us to the objective
boundary of experience, namely, to the relation to something which is not itself an
object of experience but is the ground of all experience. Reason does not, however,
teach us anything concerning the thing in itself; it only instructs us as regards its own
complete and highest use in the field of possible experience. But this is all that can be
reasonably desired in the present case, and with it we have cause to be satisfied.362
361