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Why did Kant consider the statement that all bodies are heavy to be synthetic?

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Immanuel Kant German philosopher Immanuel Kant surrounded by Ouroboros, an emblematic serpent of ancient Egypt and Greece, engraving by John Chapman, published in London, 1812.

Immanuel Kant classified the statement "all bodies are heavy" as a synthetic proposition because the concept of "heaviness" is not contained within the definition of a "body".12

In Kant’s analytic-synthetic distinction, a statement is considered analytic if the predicate is already implicit in the meaning of the subject—for example, "all bodies are extended," because extension is a defining characteristic of a body.23

Conversely, a statement is synthetic if the predicate adds information that is not logically contained in the subject. Kant argued that "all bodies are heavy" is synthetic because the notion of weight presupposes something beyond the mere concept of a body; specifically, it requires the empirical observation of the relations that bodies have to one another. By distinguishing between these types of judgments, Kant sought to explain how human knowledge can expand beyond the mere analysis of definitions to include new information about the world.1423