234 Kant: A Biography
were entirely new. The final result of the investigations he had first under¬
taken with Herz was very different from the outcome first anticipated. The
book had not only become longer, but its tone and subject matter had also
changed significantly. In fact, less than thirty pages of the Critique corre¬
spond closely to the earlier treatment. The so-called Transcendental Aes¬
thetic, or the discussion of space and time, was still recognizable as part of
the doctrine of the dissertation, but that was about it. The Transcendental
Analytic with its discussion of the categories and the principles of the un¬
derstanding, and the Transcendental Dialectic with its discussion of the
Antinomies, meant to reveal an essential contradiction of rational principles
and to establish a merely regulative use of the ideas of reason, were not only
not foreshadowed by anything in the earlier work, but were incompatible
with certain parts of the dissertation.
When Kant wrote to Lambert in September 1770 that he had arrived a
year earlier at a position that he would "never have to change, even though
extensions will be needed," he could not possibly have predicted the doc¬
trine he advanced in the Critique. His position, though perhaps fundamen¬
tally the same, did change in parts. Thus, unlike the Inaugural Disserta¬
tion, the Critique was not so much concerned with keeping intellectual
cognitions pure, as it was an attempt to show that intellectual cognition
was possible only insofar as it had a relation to sensitive cognition, and that
sensitive cognition was possible only on the assumption of intellectual
cognition. Whereas he emphasized in 1770 the distinctness of these two
faculties, he insisted in 1781 on their interdependence: "Without sensibil¬
ity no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would
be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without
concepts are blind" (A5i=B75).^171 This was an important shift. He still
accepted the discontinuity thesis, of course, but it now had only a negative
function as far as pure knowledge of noumenal entities was concerned.
The path from the Inaugural Dissertation to the Critique was thus not as
straight as Kant had first believed it would be. In a reflection written around
1776—78, he found:
Even if I can only convince people that they must wait with the development of this
science until this point has been determined, then this work has achieved its goal.
In the beginning I saw this doctrine in a twilight, as it were. I attempted quite seriously
to prove propositions and their contradictions, not in order to erect a skeptical doc¬
trine, but because I suspected an illusion of the understanding, [and attempted] to
discover what it consisted in. The year 1769 gave me a great light.^172