propositions are absolutely impossible, because they have no third term, that is, no pure object, in which the synthetical unity can exhibit the objective reality of its conceptions.
Although, then, respecting space, or the forms which productive imagination describes therein, we do cognize much à priori in synthetical judgements, and are really in no need of experience for this purpose, such knowledge would nevertheless amount to nothing but a busy trifling with a mere chimera, were not space to be considered as the condition of the phenomena which constitute the material of external experience. Hence those pure synthetical judgements do relate, though but mediately, to possible experience, or rather to the possibility of experience, and upon that alone is founded the objective validity of their synthesis.
While then, on the one hand, experience, as empirical synthesis, is the only possible mode of cognition which gives reality to all other synthesis;[1] on the other hand, this latter synthesis, as cognition à priori, possesses truth, that is, accordance with its object, only in so far as it contains nothing more than what is necessary to the synthetical unity of experience.
Accordingly, the supreme principle of all synthetical judgements is: Every object is subject to the necessary conditions of the synthetical unity of the manifold of intuition in a possible experience.
A priori synthetical judgements are possible when we apply the formal conditions of the à priori intuition, the synthesis of the imagination, and the necessary unity of that synthesis in a transcendental apperception, to a possible cognition of experience, and say: The conditions of the possibility of experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience, and have, for that reason, objective validity in an à priori synthetical judgement.
- ↑ Mental synthesis—Tr.
