such aid is entirely wanting. If
I go out of and beyond the conception A, in order to recognize another
B as connected with it, what foundation have I to rest on, whereby to
render the synthesis possible? I have here no longer the advantage of
looking out in the sphere of experience for what I want. Let us take,
for example, the proposition, "Everything that happens has a cause." In
the conception of "something that happens," I indeed think an existence
which a certain time antecedes, and from this I can derive analytical
judgements. But the conception of a cause lies quite out of the above
conception, and indicates something entirely different from "that which
happens," and is consequently not contained in that conception. How
then am I able to assert concerning the general conception--"that which
happens"--something entirely different from that conception, and to
recognize the conception of cause although not contained in it, yet as
belonging to it, and even necessarily? what is here the unknown = X,
upon which the understanding rests when it believes it has found, out of
the conception A a foreign predicate B, which it nevertheless considers
to be connected with it? It cannot be experience, because the principle
adduced annexes the two representations, cause and effect, to the
representation existence, not only with universality, which experience
cannot give, but also with the expression of necessity, therefore
completely a priori and from pure conceptions. Upon such synthetical,
that is augmentative propositions, depends the whole aim of our
speculative knowledge a priori; for although analytical judgements are
indeed highly important and necessary, they are so, only to arrive at
that clearness of conceptions which is requisite for a sure and extended
synthesis, and this alone is a real acquisition.
Mathematical judgements are always synthetical. Hitherto this fact,
though incontestably true and very important in its consequences, seems
to have escaped the analysts of the human mind, nay, to be in
complete opposition to all their conjectures. For as it was found that
mathematical conclusions all proceed according to the principle of
contradiction (which the nature of every apodictic certainty requires),
people became persuaded that the fundamental principles of the science
also were recognized and admitted in the same way. But the notion is
fallacious; for although a synthetical proposition can certainly be
discerned by means of the principle of contradiction, this is possible
only when another synthetical proposition precedes, from which the
latter is deduced, but never of itself.
Before all, be it observed, that proper mathematical propositions are
always judgements a priori,