NECESSITY

"Necessity and strict universality are therefore secure indications of an a priori cognition" (Kant, 137)

Necessity is a word that cropped up repeatedly in Critique of Pure Reason. I found my modern connotation of necessity, "something which one cannot do without" (OED), to be an cumbersome interpretation to my understanding of Critique. A definition the Oxford English Dictionary supplies that I found intriguing was "the fact of being inevitably fixed or determined." Thinking of necessity in this light really helped me understand Kant's argument. Necessity than is not the event of searching for answers metaphysically because the physical realm is too limited; rather, necessity might be thought of as a universal, innate truth. Being innate, it would be an intelligible idea deriving from a priori cognition.