Page:Kant's Prolegomena etc (1883).djvu/265

 makes the conception of their own special subject, namely, matter, available à priori, in its application to external experience (as the conception of motion, of the filling of space, of inertia, etc.). But to allow merely empirical principles to obtain in such a question, they rightly held as quite unsuited to the apodictic certainty they desired to give to their natural laws, and hence they preferred to postulate such, without investigating their sources à priori.

But it is of the utmost importance in the progress of the sciences, to sever heterogeneous principles from one another, to bring each into a special system, so that it may constitute a science of its own kind, and thereby to avoid the uncertainty springing from their confusion, owing to our not being able to distinguish to which of the two, on the one hand the limitations, and on the other the mistakes occurring in their use, are to be attributed. For this reason I have regarded it as necessary to present in one system the first principles of the pure portion of natural science (physica generalis) where mathematical constructions traverse one another, and at the same time the principles of the construction of these conceptions; in short, the possibility of a mathematical doctrine of nature itself. This separation, besides the uses already mentioned, has the special charm, which the unity of knowledge brings with it, if we take care that the boundaries of the sciences do not run into one another, but occupy properly their subdivided fields.

It may serve as a second ground for gauging this procedure, that in all that is called metaphysics the absolute completeness of the sciences may be hoped for, in such a manner as can be promised by no other species of knowledge, and therefore, just as in the metaphysics of nature generally, so here also, the completeness of corporeal nature may be confidently expected; the reason being, that in metaphysics the object is considered merely according to the universal laws of thought, but in other sciences as it must be presented according to data of intuition (empirical as well as pure). Hence the former, because the object must be invariably compared with all the necessary laws of thought, must furnish a definite number of cognitions, which can be fully