the forms of judgment will serve as a guide for the discovery of the categories.  Thought is knowledge through concepts; the understanding can make no other use of concepts than to judge by means of them.  Hence, since the understanding is the faculty of judging, the various kinds of connection in judgment must yield the various pure “connective-concepts” (Verknuepfungsbegriffe.—­K.  Fischer) or categories.

In regard to quantity, every judgment is universal, particular, or singular; in regard to quality, affirmative, negative, or infinite; in regard to relation, categorical, hypothetical, or disjunctive; and in regard to modality, problematical, assertory, or apodictic.  To these twelve forms of judgment correspond as many categories, viz., I., Unity, Plurality, Totality; II., Reality, Negation, Limitation; III., Subsistence and Inherence (Substance and Accident), Causality and Dependence (Cause and Effect), Community (Reciprocity between the Active and the Passive); IV., Possibility—­Impossibility, Existence—­Non-existence, Necessity—­Contingency.

The first six of these fundamental concepts, which have no correlatives, constitute the mathematical, the second six, which appear in pairs, the dynamical categories.  The former relate to objects of (pure or of empirical) intuition, the latter to the existence of these objects (in relation to one another or to the understanding).  Although all other a priori division though concepts must be dichotomous, each of the four heads includes three categories, the third of which in each case arises from the combination of the second and first,[1] but, nevertheless, is an original (not a derivative) concept, since this combination requires a special actus of the understanding.  Universality or totality is plurality regarded as unity, limitation is reality combined with negation, community is the reciprocal causality of substances, and necessity is the actuality given by possibility itself.  Kant omits, as unnecessary here, the useful, easy, and not unpleasant task of noting the great number of derivative concepts a priori (predicables) which spring from the combination of these twelve original concepts (predicaments = categories) with one another, or with the modes of pure sensibility,—­the concepts force, action, passion, would belong as subsumptions under causality, presence and resistance under community, origin, extinction, and change under modality,—­since his object is not a system, but only the principles of one.  His liking or even love for this division according to quantity, quality, relation, and modality, which he always has ready as though it were a universal key for philosophical problems, reveals a very strong architectonic impulse, against which even his ever active skeptical tendency is not able to keep up the battle.

[Footnote 1:  Concerning this “neat observation,” Kant remarked that it might “perhaps have important consequences in regard to the scientific form of all knowledge of reason.”  This prophecy was fulfilled, although in a different sense from that which floated before his mind.  Fichte and Hegel composed their “thought-symphonies” in the three-four time given by Kant.]