representation of a relation between two conceptions. I shall not dwell here on the faultiness of this definition, in that it suits only for categorical and not for hypothetical or disjunctive judgments, these latter containing a relation not of conceptions but of judgments themselves;—a blunder from which many evil results have followed.[1] It is more important for our present purpose to observe, that this definition does not determine in what the said relation consists.
But if I investigate more closely the relation of given cognitions in every judgment, and distinguish it, as belonging to the understanding, from the relation which is produced according to laws of the reproductive imagination, (which has only subjective validity), I find that a judgment is nothing but the mode of bringing given cognitions under the objective unity of apperception. This is plain from our use of the term of relation is in judgments, in order to distinguish the objective unity of given representations from the subjective unity. For this term indicates the relation of these representations to the original apperception, and also their necessary unity, even although the judgment is empirical, therefore contingent, as in the judgment, “All bodies are heavy.” I do not mean by this, that these representations do necessarily belong to each other in empirical intuition, but that by means of the necessary unity of apperception they belong to each other in the synthesis of intuitions, that is to say, they belong to each other according to principles of the objective determination of all our representations, in so far as cognition can arise from them, these principles being all deduced from the main principle of the transcendental unity of apperception. In this way alone can there arise from this relation a judgment, that is, a relation which has objective validity, and is perfectly distinct from that relation of the very same representations which
- ↑ The tedious doctrine of the four syllogistic figures concerns only categorical syllogisms; and although it is nothing more than an artifice by surreptitiously introducing immediate conclusions (consequentiæ immediatæ) among the premises of a pure syllogism, to give rise to an appearance of more modes of drawing a conclusion than that in the first figure, the artifice would not have had much success, had not its authors succeeded in bringing categorical judgments into exclusive respect, as those to which all others must be referred—a doctrine, however, which, according to § 5, is utterly false.
