# Critique of Pure Reason (Meiklejohn)/Translator's Preface

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE.
The following translation has been undertaken with the hope of rendering Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft intelligible to the English student.
The difficulties which meet the reader and the translator of this celebrated work arise from various causes. Kant was a man of clear, vigorous, and trenchant thought, and, after nearly twelve years’ meditation, could not be in doubt as to his own system. But the Horatian rule of
Verba prævisam rem non invita sequentur,
will not apply to him. He had never studied the art of expression. He wearies by frequent repetitions, and employs a great number of words to express, in the clumsiest way, what could have been enounced more clearly and distinctly in a few. The main statement in his sentences is often overlaid with a multitude of qualifying and explanatory clauses; and the reader is lost in a maze, from which he has great difficulty in extricating himself. There are some passages which have no main verb; others, in which the author loses sight of the subject with which he set out, and concludes with a predicate regarding something else mentioned in the course of his argument. All this can be easily accounted for. Kant, as he mentions in a letter to Lambert, took nearly twelve ​years to excogitate his work, and only five months to write it. He was a German professor, a student of solitary habits, and had never, except on one occasion, been out of Königsberg. He had, besides, to propound a new system of philosophy, and to enounce ideas that were entirely to revolutionise European thought. On the other hand, there are many excellencies of style in this work. His expression is often as precise and forcible as his thought; and, in some of his notes especially, he sums up, in two or three apt and powerful words, thoughts which, at other times, he employs pages to develope. His terminology, which has been so violently denounced, is really of great use in clearly determining his system, and in rendering its peculiarities more easy of comprehension.
A previous translation of the Kritik exists, which, had it been satisfactory, would have dispensed with the present. But the translator had, evidently, no very extensive acquaintance with the German language, and still less with his subject. A translator ought to be an interpreting intellect between the author and the reader; but, in the present case, the only interpreting medium has been the dictionary.
Indeed, Kant’s fate in this country has been a very hard one. Misunderstood by the ablest philosophers of the time, illustrated, explained, or translated by the most incompetent,—it has been his lot to be either unappreciated, misapprehended, or entirely neglected. Dugald Stewart did not understand his system of philosophy—as he had no proper opportunity of making himself acquainted with it; Nitsch and Willich undertook to introduce him to the English philosophical public; Richardson and Haywood “traduced” ​him. More recently, an Analysis of the Kritik, by Mr. Haywood, has been published, which consists almost entirely of a selection of sentences from his own translation:—a mode of analysis which has not served to make the subject more intelligible. In short, it may be asserted that there is not a single English work upon Kant, which deserves to be read, or which can be read with any profit, excepting Semple’s translation of the “Metaphysic of Ethics.” All are written by men who either took no pains to understand Kant, or were incapable of understanding him.
The following translation was begun on the basis of a MS. translation, by a scholar of some repute, placed in my hands by Mr. Bohn, with a request that I should revise it, as he had perceived it to be incorrect. After having laboured through about eighty pages, I found, from the numerous errors and inaccuracies pervading it, that hardly one-fifth of the original MS. remained. I, therefore, laid it entirely aside, and commenced de novo. These eighty pages I did not cancel, because the careful examination which they had undergone, made them, as I believed, not an unworthy representation of the author.
​The second edition of the Kritik, from which all the subsequent ones have been reprinted without alteration, is followed in the present translation. Rosenkranz, a recent editor, maintains that the author’s first edition is far superior to the second; and Schopenhauer asserts that the alterations in the second were dictated by unworthy motives. He thinks the second a Verschlimmbesserung of the first; and that the changes made by Kant, “in the weakness of old age,” have rendered it a “self-contradictory and mutilated work.” I am not insensible to the able arguments brought forward by Schopenhauer; while the authority of the elder Jacobi, Michelet, and others, adds weight to his opinion. But it may be doubted whether the motives imputed to Kant could have influenced him in the omission of certain passages in the second edition,—whether fear could have induced a man of his character to retract the statements he had advanced. The opinions he expresses in many parts of the second edition, in pages 455–460, for example, are not those of a philosopher who would surrender what he believed to be truth, at the outcry of prejudiced opponents. Nor are his attacks on the “sacred doctrines of the old dogmatic philosophy,” as Schopenhauer maintains, less bold or vigorous in the second than in the first edition. And, finally, Kant’s own testimony must be held to be of greater weight than that of any number of other philosophers, however learned and profound.
No edition of the Kritik is very correct. Even those of Rosenkranz and Schubert, and Mödes and Baumann, contain errors which reflect somewhat upon the care of the editors. But the common editions, as well those printed during, as after Kant’s life-time, are exceedingly bad. One of these, the “third edition improved, Frankfort and Leipzig, 1791,” swarms with errors, at once misleading and annoying.—Rosenkranz has ​made a number of very happy conjectural emendations, the accuracy of which cannot be doubted.
It may be necessary to mention that it has been found requisite to coin one or two new philosophical terms, to represent those employed by Kant. It was, of course, almost impossible to translate the Kritik with the aid of the philosophical vocabulary at present used in England. But these new expressions have been formed according to Horace’s maxim—parcè detorta. Such is the verb intuite for anschauen; the manifold in intuition has also been employed for das Mannigfaltige der Anschauung, by which Kant designates the varied contents of a perception or intuition. Kant’s own terminology has the merit of being precise and consistent.
Whatever may be the opinion of the reader with regard to the possibility of metaphysics—whatever his estimate of the utility of such discussions,—the value of Kant’s work, as an instrument of mental discipline, cannot easily be overrated. If the present translation contribute in the least to the advancement of scientific cultivation, if it aid in the formation of habits of severer and more profound thought, the translator will consider himself well compensated for his arduous and long-protracted labour.
J. M. D. M.
* ↑ A General and Introductory View of Professor Kant’s Principles. By F. A. Nitsch. London, 1796.
* ↑ Willich’s Elements of Kant’s Philosophy, 8vo. 1798.
* ↑ It is curious to observe, in all the English works written specially upon Kant, that not one of his commentators ever ventures, for a moment, to leave the words of Kant, and to explain the subject he may be considering, in his own words. Nitsch and Willich, who professed to write on Kant’s philosophy, are merely translators; Haywood, even in his notes, merely repeats Kant; and the translator of “Beck’s Principles of the Critical Philosophy,” while pretending to give, in his “Translator’s Preface,” his own views of the Critical Philosophy, has fabricated his Preface out of selections from the works of Kant. The same is the case with the translator of Kant’s “Essays and Treatises,” (2 vols. 8vo. London, 1798.) This person has written a preface to each of the volumes, and both are almost literal translations from different parts of Kant’s works. He had the impudence to present the thoughts contained in them as his own; few being then able to detect the plagiarism.
* ↑ Of the present translation.