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The Critique of Practical Reason

Immanuel Kant · 1788

passage 98 of 121 · BOOK*1|CHAPTER*1 > CHAPTER II. Of the Dialectic of Pure Reason in defining the (21/40)

in brief
Kant answers that practical reason extends pure reason only in a practical sense: it makes ideas assertorial for possibility, but does not discover how souls, intelligible worlds, or God are in themselves.

a will determined by that law), namely, as the supreme principle of the summum bonum in an intelligible world, by means of moral legislation in it invested with sovereign power.

Is our knowledge, however, actually extended in this way by pure practical reason, and is that immanent in practical reason which for the speculative was only transcendent? Certainly, but only in a practical point of view. For we do not thereby take knowledge of the nature of our souls, nor of the intelligible world, nor of the Supreme Being, with respect to what they are in themselves, but we have merely combined the conceptions of them in the practical concept of the summum bonum as the object of our will, and this altogether a priori, but only by means of the moral law, and merely in reference to it, in respect of the object which it commands. But how freedom is possible, and how we are to conceive this kind of causality theoretically and positively, is not thereby discovered; but only that there is such a causality is postulated by the moral law and in its behoof. It is the same with the remaining ideas, the possibility of which no human intelligence will ever fathom, but the truth of which, on the other hand, no sophistry will ever wrest from the conviction even of the commonest man.

{BOOK2|CHAPTER2 ^paragraph 65}

VII. How is it possible to conceive an Extension of Pure

Reason in a Practical point of view, without its

Knowledge as Speculative being enlarged at

the same time?

{BOOK2|CHAPTER2 ^paragraph 70}

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topics: reason and the intellect · the fear of death

The Critique of Practical Reason · Immanuel Kant · 1788