The Constitutive And Regulative Principles in Kant

such it is the ground of causality, and carries us at once out of the sphere of constitutive principles, if constitutive principles must be mathematical, into the sphere where principles are "merely" regulative. In the same way, intensive quantity, or quality, in that it gives us only the conception of a multitude among which different grades or degrees of the real may be distinguished, suggests the question of the principle upon which the object may be constructed within the qualitatively differentiated manifold. This principle, when found, must show its applicability through its capacity to combine these different degrees, if degree is to become intelligible. For, degree implies difference; there could be no meaning for the notion of degree as applied to a homogeneous. Hence, before there can be degrees there must be a relation established among the homogeneous, which recognizes or establishes differences. A degree is quantity of difference. Now this principle, if we are to appeal always to the possibility of experience, is that upon which we depend when we assert that a particular experience is possible, namely, causation. When we take the concept of the possibility of experience in its ordinary experiential sense, that is, as applying merely to the matter in hand, as, e.g., a particular problem in science, we say that a given experience is possible because observed relations demand that that experience be realized when the given conditions are fulfilled. It is p...