Where, then, is it, in what act or function of the mind, that Kant finds the matrix of these transcendent ideas? Simply in the logical forms of the understanding. Every power exerts its agency under some _laws_--that is, in the language of Kant, by certain _forms_. We leap by certain laws--viz., of equilibrium, of muscular motion, of gravitation. We dance by certain laws. So also we reason by certain laws. These laws, or _formal_ principles, under a particular condition, become the categories. Here, then, is a short derivation, in a very few words, of those ideas transcending sense which all philosophy, the earliest, has been unable to dispense with, and yet none could account for. Thus, for example, every act of reasoning must, in the first place, express itself in distinct propositions; that is, in such as contain a subject (or that concerning which you affirm or deny something), a predicate (that which you affirm or deny), and a copula, which connects them. These propositions must have what is technically called, in logic, a certain _quantity_, or compass (viz., must be universal, particular, or singular); and again they must have what is called _quality_ (that is, must be affirmative, or negative, or infinite): and thus arises a ground for certain corresponding ideas, which are Kant's categories of quantity and quality. But, to take an illustration more appropriately from the very idea which first aroused Kant to the sense of a vast hiatus in the received philosophies--the idea of _cause_, which had been thrown as an apple of discord amongst the schools by Hume. How did Kant deduce this? Simply thus: it is a doctrine of universal logic that there are three varieties of syllogism--viz., 1st, Categoric, or directly declarative [_A is B_]; 2d, Hypothetic, or conditionally declarative [_If C is D, then A is B_]; 3d, Disjunctive, or declarative by means of a choice which exhausts the possible cases [_A is either B, or C, or D; but not C or D, ergo B_]. Now, the idea of _causation,_ or, in Kant's language, the category of Cause and Effect, is deduced immediately, and most naturally, as the reader will acknowledge on examination, from the 2d or hypothetic form of syllogism, when the relation of dependency is the same as in the idea of causation, and the _necessary_ connexion a direct type of that which takes place between a cause and its effect.