KANT'S ANTITHESIS OF DOGMATISM AND CRITICISM. 211 dass hierzu notwendig etwas rnehr erfordert werde, als diese Begriffe zu haben, es gehore noch ein Grund dazu, um mehr, .als ich in jenen schon denke, mit Wahrheit hinzutun . . . so will ich wissen, was denn das fur Grund sei, der mich, ausser dem, was meinem Begriffe wesentlich eigen ist und was ich schon wusste, mit mehrerem und zwar notwen- dig als Attribut zu einem Dinge Gehorigen, aber doch nicht im Begriffe desselben Enthaltenen bekannt macht." 1 In so far as they are synthetic, then, we must look farther for a " ground of the possibility " of these judgments containing .attributa as predicates. But, now, " any one may see that, in what I have already set forth as the summary result of the whole analytical part of the Kritik of the Understanding, I have therein explained, with all needful explicitness, the principle of synthetic judgments in general, namely : that they are not possible except under the condition of a percep- tion underlying their subject one which, when they are a posteriori judgments, is empirical, and when they are synthetic judgments a priori is a pure a priori percept. . . . Compare now with this the pretended principle which is presented in Eberhard's account of the nature of synthetic judgments a priori : ' They are judgments which affirm of the subject one of its attributa that is to say, a predicate which necessarily but only derivatively (nur als Folge) belongs to the subject.' . . . Now one is justified in asking whether the ground for the affirmation of the predicate is to be sought for in the subject, according to the principle of contradiction in which case the judgment would still be merely analytical ; or whether the predicate is incapable of being deduced from the concept of the subject by the principle of contradiction in which case the attributum is purely synthetic. Thus neither the name
- attributum,' nor the principle of sufficient reason, serves to
distinguish synthetical from analytical propositions ; if the former are to be affirmed a priori, one could say no more of them (according to this phraseology) than that their predi- cate is somehow or other grounded in the essence of the con- cept of the subject and is therefore a ' property ' but not simply in consequence of the principle of contradiction. But how, as a synthetic property, this predicate comes to be bound up with the concept of the subject when it cannot be drawn out of the subject by analysis cannot be explained by the concept of a ' property,' so that Herr Eberhard's account of the matter is wholly barren. But the Kritik clearly sets 1 Kant appears to have forgotten that, a few pages earlier, he had ex- plained to us how predicates not contained in the essence may, by the principle of contradiction, be ' developed out ' of a concept analytically. [
