The philosophy of Kant - 1891 Author:Immanuel Kant Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: — - once for all of its pernicious influence by closing up the xxxv sources of its errors. Our critique is not opposed to the dogmatic procedure of reason as... more » a science of pure knowledge, but only to dogmatism, that is, to the presumption that we may follow the time-honoured method of constructing a system of pure metaphysic out of principles that rest upon mere conceptions, without first asking in what way reason has come into possession of them, and by what right it employs them. Dogmatism, in a word, is the dogmatic procedure of reason without any prnriotts criticism of its own powers. The critique of pure reason is not a criticism of books vi and systems, but of the faculty of reason in general, in so far as reason seeks for knowledge that is independent of all experience. I have evaded none of its questions, on the plea of the imbecility of human reason. In fact, vii reason is so perfect a unity that, if it were in principle inadequate to the solution of even a single one of the questions which by its very nature it raises, we might at once with perfect certainty set it aside as incapable of xxxvii answering any of the others. For as it is a true organic unity, in which the whole exists for the sake of each of the parts, and each part for the sake of the whole, xxxviii the slightest imperfection, whether it is due to a flaw or to a defect, will inevitably betray itself in use. INTRODUCTION. i. Distinction of Pure and Empirical Knowledge. There can be no doubt whatever that all our knowledge begins with experience. By what means should the faculty of knowledge be aroused to activity but by objects, which, acting upon our senses, partly of themselves produce ideas in us, and partly set our understanding at work to compare these ideas with one another, and...« less