solid one or no. Arrived at this point, all sorts
of excuses are sought after, in order to console us for its want of
stability, or rather, indeed, to enable Us to dispense altogether with
so late and dangerous an investigation. But what frees us during the
process of building from all apprehension or suspicion, and flatters
us into the belief of its solidity, is this. A great part, perhaps the
greatest part, of the business of our reason consists in the analysation
of the conceptions which we already possess of objects. By this means we
gain a multitude of cognitions, which although really nothing more than
elucidations or explanations of that which (though in a confused manner)
was already thought in our conceptions, are, at least in respect of
their form, prized as new introspections; whilst, so far as regards
their matter or content, we have really made no addition to our
conceptions, but only disinvolved them. But as this process does furnish
a real priori knowledge, which has a sure progress and useful results,
reason, deceived by this, slips in, without being itself aware of it,
assertions of a quite different kind; in which, to given conceptions it
adds others, a priori indeed, but entirely foreign to them, without our
knowing how it arrives at these, and, indeed, without such a question
ever suggesting itself. I shall therefore at once proceed to examine the
difference between these two modes of knowledge.
In all judgements wherein the relation of a subject to the predicate is
cogitated (I mention affirmative judgements only here; the application
to negative will be very easy), this relation is possible in two
different ways. Either the predicate B belongs to the subject A, as
somewhat which is contained (though covertly) in the conception A; or
the predicate B lies completely out of the conception A, although
it stands in connection with it. In the first instance, I term the
judgement analytical, in the second, synthetical. Analytical judgements
(affirmative) are therefore those in which the connection of the
predicate with the subject is cogitated through identity; those in which
this connection is cogitated without identity, are called synthetical
judgements. The former may be called explicative, the latter
augmentative judgements; because the former add in the predicate
nothing to the conception of the subject, but only analyse it into its
constituent conceptions, which were thought already in the subject,
although in a confused manner; the latter add to our conceptions of the
subject a predicate which was not contained in it, and which no analysis
could ever have discovered therein