ABSTRACT
THE principal task which Kant sets himself in the Critique of Pure Reason is the analysis of human knowledge into its elements. The first part of the Critique is therefore called the Transcendental Doctrine of Elements. It is divided into the Transcendental Æsthetic and the Transcendental Logic, the former dealing with intuition and the latter with the understanding. In the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason we find the following passage: “By way of introduction or anticipation we need only say that there are two stems of human knowledge, namely, sensibility and understanding, which perhaps spring from a common, but to us unknown, root. Through the former, objects are given to us; through the latter, they are thought. Now in so far as sensibility may be found to contain a priori representations constituting the condition under which objects are given to us, it will belong to transcendental philosophy. And since the conditions under which alone the objects of human knowledge are given must precede those under which they are thought, the transcendental doctrine of sensibility will constitute the first part of the science of the elements.” (B 29, 30.)
