only to be convinced that there is an absolutely necessary use of pure
reason--the moral use--in which it inevitably transcends the limits
of sensibility, without the aid of speculation, requiring only to be
insured against the effects of a speculation which would involve it
in contradiction with itself. To deny the positive advantage of the
service which this criticism renders us would be as absurd as to
maintain that the system of police is productive of no positive
benefit, since its main business is to prevent the violence which
citizen has to apprehend from citizen, that so each may pursue his
vocation in peace and security. That space and time are only forms
of sensible intuition, and hence are only conditions of the
existence of things as phenomena; that, moreover, we have no
conceptions of the understanding, and, consequently, no elements for
the cognition of things, except in so far as a corresponding intuition
can be given to these conceptions; that, accordingly, we can have no
cognition of an object, as a thing in itself, but only as an object
of sensible intuition, that is, as phenomenon--all this is proved in
the analytical part of the Critique; and from this the limitation of
all possible speculative cognition to the mere objects of
experience, follows as a necessary result. At the same time, it must
be carefully borne in mind that, while we surrender the power of
cognizing, we still reserve the power of thinking objects, as things
in themselves.* For, otherwise, we should require to affirm the
existence of an appearance, without something that appears--which
would be absurd. Now let us suppose, for a moment, that we had not
undertaken this criticism and, accordingly, had not drawn the
necessary distinction between things as objects of experience and
things as they are in themselves. The principle of causality, and,
by consequence, the mechanism of nature as determined by causality,
would then have absolute validity in relation to all things as