“The cause of this transcendental illusion is that there are fundamental rules and maxims for the employment of Reason, subjectively regarded as a faculty of human knowledge, and that these rules and maxims have all the appearance of being objective principles. We take the subjective necessity of a connection of our concepts, _i.e._ a connection necessitated for the advantage of the understanding, for an objective necessity in the determination of things in themselves. This is an illusion which can no more be prevented than we can prevent the sea from appearing higher at the horizon than at the shore, since we see it through higher light rays; or to cite a still better example, than the astronomer can prevent the moon from appearing larger at its rising, although he is not deceived by this illusion.... There exists, then, a natural and unavoidable dialectic of pure Reason, not one in which a bungler might entangle himself through lack of knowledge, or one which some sophist has artificially invented to confuse thinking people, but one which is inseparable from human Reason, and which, even after its deceiving power has been exposed, will not cease to play tricks with it and continually to entrap it into momentary aberrations that will ever and again call for correction.”[91] =Dogmatism.=[92]--According to Kant there are three possible standpoints in philosophy--the dogmatic, the sceptical, and the critical. All preceding thinkers come under the first two heads. A dogmatist is one who assumes that human reason can comprehend ultimate reality, and who proceeds upon this assumption. He does not, before proceeding to construct a metaphysics, enquire whether it is possible. Dogmatism expresses itself (to borrow Vaihinger’s convenient mode of definition[93]) through three factors--_rationalism_, _realism_, and _transcendence_. Descartes and Leibniz are typical dogmatists. As rationalists they hold that it is possible to determine from pure _a priori_ principles the ultimate nature of God, of the soul, and of the material universe. They are realists in that they assert that by human thought the complete nature of objective reality can be determined. They also adopt the attitude of transcendence. Through pure thought they go out beyond the sensible and determine the supersensuous. Scepticism (Kant, as above stated,[94] regards it as being in effect equivalent to empiricism) may similarly be defined through the three terms, _empiricism_, _subjectivism_, _immanence_. A sceptic can never be a rationalist. He must reduce knowledge to sense-experience. For this reason also his knowledge is infected by subjective conditions; through sensation we cannot hope to determine the nature of the objectively real. This attitude is also that of immanence; knowledge is limited to the sphere of sense-experience. Criticism has similarly its three