As to what is necessary for the possibility of any
employment of reason at all, namely, that its principles and
affirmations should not contradict one another, this constitutes no
part of its interest, but is the condition of having reason at all; it
is only its development, not mere consistency with itself, that is
reckoned as its interest.
If practical reason could not assume or think as given anything
further than what speculative reason of itself could offer it from its
own insight, the latter would have the primacy. But supposing that
it had of itself original a priori principles with which certain
theoretical positions were inseparably connected, while these were
withdrawn from any possible insight of speculative reason (which,
however, they must not contradict); then the question is: Which
interest is the superior (not which must give way, for they are not
necessarily conflicting), whether speculative reason, which knows
nothing of all that the practical offers for its acceptance, should
take up these propositions and (although they transcend it) try to
unite them with its own concepts as a foreign possession handed over
to it, or whether it is justified in obstinately following its own
separate interest and, according to the canonic of Epicurus, rejecting
as vain subtlety everything that cannot accredit its objective reality
by manifest examples to be shown in experience, even though it
should be never so much interwoven with the interest of the
practical (pure) use of reason, and in itself not contradictory to the
theoretical, merely because it infringes on the interest of the
speculative reason to this extent, that it removes the bounds which
this latter had set to itself, and gives it up to every nonsense or
delusion of imagination?
In fact, so far as practical reason is taken as dependent on
pathological conditions, that is, as merely regulating the
inclinations under the sensible principle of happiness, we could not
require speculative reason to take its principles from such a
source.
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