A word of Kant Aimed at the Laggard in Thinking

I proceed in the same way with the other concepts of reflection.
Matter is substantia phaenomenon. a What pertains to it internally I seek
in all parts of space that it occupies and in all effects that it carries out,
and which can certainly always be only appearances of outer sense. I
therefore have nothing absolutely but only comparatively internal,
which itself in turn consists of outer relations. Yet the absolutely internal
in matter, according to pure understanding, is a mere fancy, for it is
nowhere an object for the pure understanding; the transcendental object,b
however, which might be the ground of this appearance that we
call matter, is a mere something, about which we would not understand
what it is even if someone could tell us. For we cannot understand anything
except that which has something corresponding to our words in
intuition. If the complaints “That we have no insight into the inner
in things”!II are to mean that we do not understand through pure reason
what the things that appear to us might be in themselves, then they
are entirely improper and irrational; for they would have us be able to
cognize things, thus intuit them, even without senses, consequently
they would have it that we have a faculty of cognition entirely distinct
from the human not merely in degree but even in intuition and kind,
and thus that we ought to be not humans but beings that we cannot
even say are possible
, let alone how they are constituted. Observation
and analysis of the appearances penetrate into what is inner in nature,
and one cannot know how far this will go in time. Those transcendental
questions, however, that go beyond nature, we will never be able to
answer, even if all of nature is revealed to us, sinceC it is never given to
us to observe our own mind with any other intuition that that of our
inner sense. For in that lies the mystery of the origin of our sensibility.
Its relationa to an object, b and what might be the transcendental ground
of this unity, undoubtedly lie too deeply hidden for us, who know even
ourselves only through inner sense, thus as appearance, to be able to use
such an unsuitable tool of investigation to find out anything except always
more appearances, even though we would gladly investigate their
non-sensible cause.

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