reason, only served to raise the mere phenomenon, the work of Mâyâ, the shadow world of Plato, to the one highest reality, to put it in the place of the inmost and true being of things, and thereby to make the real knowledge of this impossible; that is, in a word, to send the dreamers still more soundly to sleep. Kant exhibited these laws, and therefore the whole world, as conditioned by the form of knowledge belonging to the subject; from which it followed, that however far one carried investigation and reasoning under the guidance of these laws, yet in the principal matter, _i.e._, in knowledge of the nature of the world in itself and outside the idea, no step in advance was made, but one only moved like a squirrel in its wheel. Thus, all the dogmatists may be compared to persons who supposed that if they only went straight on long enough they would come to the end of the world; but Kant then circumnavigated the world and showed that, because it is round, one cannot get out of it by horizontal movement, but that yet by perpendicular movement this is perhaps not impossible. We may also say that Kant’s doctrine affords the insight that we must seek the end and beginning of the world, not without, but within us. All this, however, rests on the fundamental distinction between dogmatic and _critical_ or _transcendental philosophy_. Whoever wishes to make this quite clear to himself, and realise it by means of an example, may do so very briefly by reading, as a specimen of dogmatic philosophy, an essay of Leibnitz entitled “_De Rerum Originatione Radicali_,” and printed for the first time in the edition of the philosophical works of Leibnitz by Erdmann (vol. i. p. 147). Here the origin and excellence of the world is demonstrated _a priori_, so thoroughly in the manner of realistic-dogmatism, on the ground of the _veritates æternæ_ and with the assistance of the ontological and cosmological proofs. It is indeed once admitted, by the way, that experience shows the exact opposite of the excellence of the world here demonstrated; but experience is therefore given to understand that it knows nothing of the matter, and ought to hold its tongue when philosophy has spoken a priori. Now, with Kant, the _critical philosophy_ appeared as the opponent of this whole method. It takes for its problem just these _veritates æternæ_, which serve as the foundation of every such dogmatic structure, investigates their origin, and finds it in the human mind, where they spring from the peculiar forms which belong to it, and which it carries in itself for the purpose of comprehending an objective world. Thus, here, in the brain, is the quarry which supplies the material for that proud dogmatic edifice. But because the critical philosophy, in order to attain to this result, was obliged to go beyond the _veritates æternæ_ upon which all the preceding dogmatism was founded, and make these truths themselves the objects of investigation, it became _transcendental_ philosophy.