Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics Quotes

“All false art, all vain wisdom, lasts its time but finally destroys itself, and its highest culture is also the epoch of its decay.”
― Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

“Mathematics, natural science, laws, arts, even morality, etc. do not completely fill the soul; there is always a space left over reserved for pure and speculative reason, the emptiness of which prompts us to seek in vagaries, buffooneries, and mysticism for what seems to be employment and entertainment, but what actually is mere pastime undertaken in order to deaden the troublesome voice of reason, which, in accordance with its nature, requires something that can satisfy it and does not merely subserve other ends or the interests of our inclinations.”
― Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

“High towers, and metaphysically-great men resembling them, round both of which there is commonly much wind, are not for me. My place is the fruitful bathos, the bottom-land, of experience; and the word transcendental, does not signify something passing beyond all experience, but something that indeed precedes it a priori, but that is intended simply to make cognition of experience possible.”
― Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

“Hence we may at once dismiss as easily foreseen but futile objection, “that by our admitting the ideality of space and of time the whole sensible world would be turned into mere illusion.”
― Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics

“It is certainly a bad sign of common sense to appeal to it as a witness.”
― Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

“the work is dry, obscure, opposed to all ordinary notions, and moreover long-winded.”
― Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics

“Thus there is an analogy between the juridical relation of human actions and the mechanical relation of moving forces. I never can do anything to another man without giving him a right to do the same to me on the same conditions; just as no body can act with its moving force on another body without thereby causing the other to react equally against it.”
― Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics

“An appeal to the consent of the common sense of mankind cannot be allowed, for that is a witness whose authority depends merely upon rumor. Says Horace: Quodcunque ostendis mihi sic, incredulus odi.”
― Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics

“I have myself given this my theory the name of transcendental idealism, but that cannot authorize any one to confound it either with the empirical idealism of Descartes, (indeed, his was only an insoluble problem, owing to which he thought every one at liberty to deny the existence of the corporeal world, because it could never be proved satisfactorily), or with the mystical and visionary idealism of Berkeley, against which and other similar phantasms our Critique contains the proper antidote. My idealism concerns not the existence of things (the doubting of which, however, constitutes idealism in the ordinary sense), since it never came into my head to doubt it, but it concerns the sensuous representation of things, to which space and time especially belong.”
― Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

“There are things given to us as objects of our senses existing outside us, yet we know nothing of them as they may be in themselves, but are acquainted only with their appearances, i.e., with the representations that they produce in us because they affect our senses. Accordingly, I by all means avow that there are bodies outside us, i.e., things which, though completely unknown to us as to what they may be in themselves, we know through the representations which their influence on our sensibility provides for us, and to which we give the name of a body—which word therefore merely signifies the appearance of this object that is unknown to us but is nonetheless real.”
― Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

“I do not say that things in themselves possess a quantity, that their reality possesses a degree, their existence a connection of accidents in a substance, etc. This nobody can prove, because such a synthetic connection from mere concepts, without any reference to sensuous intuition on the one side or connection of such intuition in a possible experience on the other, is absolutely impossible.”
― Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

“It is certainly a bad sign of common sense
to appeal to it as a witness.”
― Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

“I freely admit that the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy”
― Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

“To appeal to common sense when insight and science fail, and no sooner—this is one of the subtle discoveries of modern times, by means of which the most superficial ranter can safely enter the lists with the most thorough thinker and hold his own.”
― Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics

“My object is to persuade all those who think metaphysics worth studying that it is absolutely necessary to pause a moment and, disregarding all that has been done, to propose first the preliminary question, “Whether such a thing as metaphysics be at all possible?”
― Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics

“The crux of his new philosophy is this: What assurance do we have that our a priori (rational) thoughts have in reality a relation to objects that exist apart from us?”
― Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics

“Was nicht ein Gegenstand der Erfahrung sein kann, dessen Erkenntniß wäre hyperphysisch, und mit dergleichen haben wir hier gar nicht zu thun, sondern mit der Naturerkenntniß, deren Realität durch Erfahrung bestätigt werden kann, on sie gleich a priori möglich ist und vor aller Erfahrung hervorgeht.”
― Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics