This, as
we have elsewhere clearly shown, can be done well enough without
needing any intuition (either sensible or supersensible) because the
categories have their seat and origin in the pure understanding,
simply as the faculty of thought, before and independently of any
intuition, and they always only signify an object in general, no
matter in what way it may be given to us. Now when the categories
are to be applied to these ideas, it is not possible to give them
any object in intuition; but that such an object actually exists,
and consequently that the category as a mere form of thought is here
not empty but has significance, this is sufficiently assured them by
an object which practical reason presents beyond doubt in the
concept of the summum bonum, the reality of the conceptions which
are required for the possibility of the summum bonum; without,
however, effecting by this accession the least extension of our
knowledge on theoretical principles.
When these ideas of God, of an intelligible world (the kingdom of
God), and of immortality are further determined by predicates taken
from our own nature, we must not regard this determination as a
sensualizing of those pure rational ideas (anthropomorphism), nor as a
transcendent knowledge of supersensible objects; for these
predicates are no others than understanding and will, considered too
in the relation to each other in which they must be conceived in the
moral law, and therefore, only so far as a pure practical use is
made of them.
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