Kant's Section 27 of the Transcendental Deduction

Section 27

Result of this deduction of the concepts of the understanding.

We cannot think any object except through categories; we cannot cognize any object that is thought except through intuitions that correspond to those concepts. Now all our intuitions are sensible, and this cognition, so far as it s object is given, is empirical. Empirical cognition, however, is experience. Consequently no a priori cognition is possible for us except solely of objects of possible experience.
But this cognition, which is limited merely to objects of experience, is not on that account all borrowed from experience; rather, with regard to the pure intuitions as well as the pure concepts of the understanding, there are elements of cognition that are to be encountered in us a priori. Now there are only two ways in which a necessary agreement of experience with the concepts of its objects can be thought: either the experience makes these concepts possible or these concepts make the experience possible. The first is not the case with the categories nor with pure sensible intuition); for they are a priori concepts, hence independent of experience (the assertion of an empirical origin would be a sort of generatio aequivoca). Consequently only the second way remains (as it were a system of the epigenesis of pure reason): namely that the categories contain the grounds of the possibility of all experience in general from the side of the understanding. But more about how they make experience possible, and which principles of its possibility they yield in their application to appearances, will be taught in the following chapter on the transcendental use of the power of judgment.
If someone still wanted to propose a middle way between the only tow, already named ways, namely, that the categories were neither self-thought a priori first principles of our cognition nor drawn from experience, but were rather subjective predispositions for thinking, implanted in us along with our existence by our author in such a way that their use would agree exactly with the laws of nature along which experience runs (a kind of reformation-system of pure reason), then (besides the fact that on such a hypothesis no end can be seen to how far one might drive the presupposition of predetermined predispositions for future judgments) this would be decisive against the supposed middle way: that in such a case the categories would lack the necessity that is essential to their concept. For, e.g., the concept of cause, which asserts the necessity of a consequent under a presupposed condition, would be false if it rested only on a subjective necessity, arbitrarily implanted in us, of combining certain empirical representations according to such a rule of relation. I( would not be able to say that the effect is combined with the cause in the object (i.e., necessarily =(, but only that I am so constituted that I cannot think of this representation otherwise then as so connected; which is precisely what the skeptic wishes most, for then all of our insight through the supposed objective validity of our judgments is nothing but sheer illusion, and there would be not shortage of people who would not concede this subjective necessity *(which must be felt) on their own; at last one would not be able to quarrel with anyone about that which merely spends on the way in which his subject is organized.


Brief concept of this deduction.

It is the exhibition of the pure concepts of the understanding (and with them of all theoretical cognition a priori as principles of the possibility of experience, but of the latter as the determination of appearances in space and time in general and the latter, finally ,from the principle of the original synthetic unity of apperception, as the form of the understanding in relation to space and time, as original forms of sensibility.
I hold the division into paragraphs to be necessary only this far, because we have been dealing with the elementary concepts. Now that we will represent their use, th exposition may proceed in a continuous fashion, without this division.