Open a copy of the *Critique of Pure Reason* sometime and just get a load of the length of some of those sentences, and of the thought that is contained within them, as the gist of it is seen to wind through clause and subclause to go diving ever the deeper into parenthetical equivocation upon this point and then that, before winding back out again to go seeking toward the original subject and whatever was being predicated of it.

One comes to a point of wondering what, if anything is to be gained by it all--other than a sort of gymnastic regimen of mental muscle building. So, for one thing, yes, it's worth it for that, just as it was for Kant when he was reading Aristotle--but other than that?

Yes. Insofar as Kant remains faithful (and he doesn't always) to a self-imposed regimen of being critic to his own process of reasoning, to his own judgments, and all the more essentially to his own inclinations which would otherwise favor, flavor, bias his judgments toward what he, personally, would like to be the case, in terms of what he might already believe. But as Kant would not permit for himself the luxury of that all-too-human and ever so despicably common, undisciplined indulgence in spoiled brat mendacity; so long as he holds to that, refusing to himself every stupid human trick of intellectual legerdemain, as he sticks like the shoemaker to his last, he is able to produce a few entirely remarkable discoveries concerning the question of what man can know, how he can know and how much, based not upon what man's senses show him, but strictly on a process of pure reasoning.

Pure reason is, first and foremost "pure" only if it is kept clean, to be ruled by logic untainted, unbent by the desire of the thinker for it to prove merely what the thinker already thinks or believes--or would hope to be true. Kant believes that thought, when given free reign, free i.e. from the desires of the thinker, may go where logic drives it toward a synthesis of new knowledge--not based on experience, experiment, evidence of the senses, but by means of man's rational equipment alone.

What sort of knowledge? Aside from mathematics, there is ethics, psychology, the metaphysics of justice, sociology, politics, fields of inquiry that are otherwise in an enormous mess either because of sloppy or dishonest reasoning or by application of empirical method to subject matter that will not support it.

But how can such non-empirical knowledge be derived? Quite simply, this is possible because the workings of human reason are governed by the same laws which give order to all the rest of Nature. Though Kant was writing in Pre-Darwinian times, he saw in what he calls "a science of metaphysics" the possibility for something quite like Natural Selection, where a naturally ordered synthesis arises by a selective process of critical judgments, by a survival of what works logically, what is 'fittest', most fit and in keeping with reason over against the whole slough of weak, ill-formed things that do not synthesize with the eco-system of what is already in harmony.

This is to produce by Pure Reason an evolution of human knowledge--but no Pie in the Sky was this! Kant was already seeing it in action, as he marveled over what his contemporaries, Descartes, Leibnitz and Newton were producing--whether they knew it or not--by this process for Natural Science, Mathematics and Geometry.

Kant was being given to understand, most especially with a view to Geometry, that by fixing upon certain indemonstrable First Principles intuited as being self-evidently true, if what follows from those things axiomatically is seen to be in accord with reason without fault and as such produces results in the real world then this is science just as surely as the empirical method is science. The proof is *teleological*--as from the 'tail' of the thing, the head is known, by the result the principle is seen to be valid. But other than that, unlike the facts and data of empiricism, these theorems cannot be proven by anything *prior* to themselves, or i.e. higher in priority of universality, or in causality, of time, position, motion, category, genus, etc. This is the meaning of that which is *a priori*, better known, or previously known.

Somewhere the process comes to that for which nothing is prior. And this is where we come to a concept, a theorem, a principle which like some star just radiates its truth self-evidently--but how? Because of something that the human mind already, concretely, congenitally knows, *a priori* as untutored by anything outside itself and the thing contemplated. Something the mind sees, naturally, in that thing, of what it is, in itself, *noumenatively*, it knows because something in the makeup of the mind is like that thing, or somehow, by Nature, *is* that thing and so has an affinity of understanding as to that thing.

Both things being natural, reason and the object of reason, the mind knowing itself, ineffably feels its own nature, thinks its own nature, works according to its nature, by which it intuits an analog of itself to the thing contemplated and understands what it is--mind to thing--without intervention of anything else.

Here in the self-evident truth, the mind is in synthesis with its object.

Now that is different, yet much related to what happens when the mind can intuit a synthesis of new knowledge between two or more truths or theorems that are not in themselves analytically related each to the other and cannot be derived deductively one from the other.

What Kant saw in the theorems, axioms and corollaries of Geometry, is how other truths, new truths, new axioms could be either axiomatic of or corollary to the "theorems" already known. There are axioms that were already in a theorem all along, as inductive or deductive analytical judgments a priori were engaged to understand that. Otherwise there were corollaries being intuited as a synthesis between two or more separate and otherwise analytically unrelated theorems by what Kant called the *synthetical judgment a priori*.

With the *synthetical judgment a priori*, the same form of intuition is taking place as that which judges a truth to be self-evident. Something about the Nature of the mind makes the synthesis possible because something like those two or more things and their relation has an analog in the mind, either as from prior knowledge of another like synthesis or its some purely unconscious Natural process of the reasoning mind that carries the analog.

The point of this synthetic form of reasoning however is that there is nothing in the one thing, of itself, to imply its connection with the other thing, in itself and that is the reason why a metaphor of catalysis might be useful. A catalyst effects a reaction without entering into it. Something about sunlight induces the chlorophyll in a plant to go into reaction with carbon dioxide to produce oxygen. Something about the mind, some light must enter in to produce the judgment that two or more objects of the mind are somehow related as the elements of some new, heretofore unintuited knowledge.

This, *but for one thing* is very unlike the analytical judgment a priori which requires nothing from the mind but strict observation, deduction, subtraction (nothing being added or multiplied by the mind) since the predicate is already in the subject, as the subject could not be the subject but for the possibility of that predicate. Yet, the "one thing" which is the same, is that the deduction or induction is *self- evident*.

Kant had recovered for the study of logic what had been lost from the work of Aristotle and had been confused ever since, as so it remains unto those who are not getting this central part of Kant's metaphysics. Logicians are still assuming that deductive and inductive reasoning are all Aristotle and Kant wrote, as the immense error is being taught that "inductive reasoning" is the same as Kant's *synthetical judgment a priori*. Nothing of the kind!

Both inductive and deductive reasoning are the result of analysis. As inductive moves from the particular to the universal, it is merely picking up the specific threads leading to a genus, a category that is already there. The species is *in* the genus. You look at this horse and that horse, this zebra and that jackass, so you intuit the genus, equus. That was inductive. Otherwise you are informed that there is the genus Equus containing all creatures with hooves, manes, elongated heads, upwardly protruding ears. You see an ostrich and you deduce that it is not a horse. The genus name *equus* merely means "horse", and once you've seen a horse race at Hollywood Park, next thing you know, you're over to the San Diego zoo looking at a Zebra and you deduce, by strict observation of the genus characteristics in that animal, "By god, that's a horse!"

Synthetical judgments a priori don't work like that. In this case, you might look at the zebra and say, "By god, that's the ugliest NFL referee I ever saw!" Or you think, "By god, there goes one jackass that should stay off the Santa Monica freeway when they're painting new stripes down the centerline!" In either case your synthetical judgment a priori was all wet, because the reasoning in the above two instances was proceeding not by synthetic analogy but by identity of a single attribute namely, stripes.

More along the lines of a synthetical judgment a priori would be to look at a penguin, and not to see something else of the same genus such as a least tern, or a barn swallow, but to see in terms of a prior knowledge about evolution-- something else.

Had you never in your life seen a zebra, but you had seen horses and then the day dawns when a zebra comes prancing down the street, you would say, "By god, that's the funniest looking horse I ever saw!" And your analytical judgment a priori would have been correct. You were looking at a horse, or to be less specific, recognizing, by induction, the genus of Horse.

Now just say that you had seen many a porpoise in your time, but then one day you found yourself with a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine standing in line behind a penguin down at Ralph's, and you were heard to say, "By god, that's the funniest looking porpoise I ever saw!" It wouldn't be long before you were in the back of an ambulance on your way to the locked ward at L.A. County General. And yet, your synthetical judgment a priori, might well have been correct, while your psychiatrist, your analyst who can't stop thinking inside the box of deduction and induction is just not seeing the sense of your synthetical intuition.

Okay, you know about evolution and how reptiles evolved into birds, that there were reptilian birds, whereas the link, the possibility of a synthesis (evolution) from reptiles to mammals via birds is yet to have been understood, synthesized, judged. But you are a thinker outside the box and as you see that penguin, you see on the penguin what is not for the birds, which is outside the box for most birds--wings that cannot fly. You see that unlike another bird with useless wings, an ostrich, this bird's wings have evolved into flippers for swimming such as you would see on whales, seals, the walrus and the porpoise.

You have seen the way a porpoise can come flying out of the water like a bird, just as you have seen penguins come shooting through the surface of the sea up into the air like the porpoise, but up onto the ice-shelf, back to the land, unlike the porpoise. You have made note of the bird- like bill on the face of the porpoise, as you have even seen it on some species of whales, as you've seen killer whales like the porpoise seem to walk upright on the surface of the water just as a penguin does over the ice--and you have noted how very much like a penguin is the killer whale's tuxedo.

Here, outside of the Theory of Evolution, had you no knowledge of that, you would never have the analogies in mind to make the synthesis, as you would remain blind to any analytical identities between that bird and that mammal--of which there are none: all are intuited analogically.

But since you do know your Darwin, and because you know that not all apes evolved into humans, that some species never went through the chain of mutations, and remained behind to continue propagating as apes, you make the analogy to the penguin and see that not all of them had gone through the sea change to become killer whales and porpoises.

Despite the fact that much of this reasoning has depended upon observation, experience of being taught about evolution, how it works, even so there is no experiment you can think to perform to produce the empirical evidence you would need to prove, as you would say, "scientifically" and beyond a shadow of doubt that your hunch about the evolutionary synthesis between penguins and porpoises is so. Even in the event of some astonishing result showing the DNA of the two species is sharing altogether too many gene factors for any other deduction to be made; then all the better because what was at first judged metaphysically to be the truth minus the rigorous hard science from lab, was indeed the truth, hard science or no hard science.

This is what Kant is talking about when he proposes that there is most certainly, a *Science of Metaphysics* indeed. And just as certainly as there is the other form of hard, empirical science that can only obtain its body of facts inside the analytical box of empirical deduction and induction as an analysis of the hard evidence- -that end of empirical science is dead in the water without the synthetical judgments a priori that have first been arrived upon in theory.

Einstein's relativity was not changed one iota by the empirical proof of its truth obtained through observation of solar eclipse, and production of the atom bomb. It was valid as metaphysical science, as philosophy years before it ever came to be proven as hard scientific fact. And that's what Kant is talking about, as he's been saying that when reason is treated with a kind of sacred veneration, such that no mendacity or trick of rhetoric will be permitted to taint its purity, it can attain to a discovery of knowledge that is no less, if not more powerful than all the experimental accoutrements of purely empirical physics and chemistry.
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"The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness." Albert Einstein