confine ourselves to the abstract concepts, these distinctions vanish. Then a chain of alternating causes and effects, or of alternating logical reasons and consequents, is given out as simply a chain of causes of the last effect, or reasons of the last consequent, and the _completeness of the conditions_, through which alone a reason becomes _sufficient_, appears as the completeness of that assumed _series_ of reasons alone, which only exist on account of the last consequent. There then appears the abstract principle of the reason very boldly with its demand for the unconditioned. But, in order to recognise the invalidity of this claim, there is no need of a critique of reason by means of antinomies and their solution, but only of a critique of reason understood in my sense, an examination of the relation of abstract knowledge to direct intuitive knowledge, by means of ascending from the indefinite generality of the former to the fixed definiteness of the latter. From such a critique, then, it here appears that the nature of the reason by no means consists in the demand for an unconditioned; for, whenever it proceeds with full deliberation, it must itself find that an unconditioned is an absurdity. The reason as a faculty of knowledge can always have to do only with objects; but every object for the subject is necessarily and irrevocably subordinated to the principle of sufficient reason, both _a parte ante_ and _a parte post_. The validity of the principle of sufficient reason is so involved in the form of consciousness that we absolutely cannot imagine anything objective of which no _why_ could further be demanded; thus we cannot imagine an absolute absolute, like a blind wall in front of us. That his convenience should lead this or that person to stop at some point, and assume such an absolute at pleasure, is of no avail against that incontestable certainty _a priori_, even if he should put on an air of great importance in doing so. In fact, the whole talk about the absolute, almost the sole theme of philosophies since Kant, is nothing but the cosmological proof _incognito_. This proof, in consequence of the case brought against it by Kant, deprived of all right and declared outlawed, dare no longer show itself in its true form, and therefore appears in all kinds of disguises—now in distinguished form, concealed under intellectual intuition or pure thought; now as a suspicious vagabond, half begging, half demanding what it wants in more unpretending philosophemes. If an absolute must absolutely be had, then I will give one which is far better fitted to meet all the demands which are made on such a thing than these visionary phantoms; it is matter. It has no beginning, and it is imperishable; thus it is really independent, and _quod per se est et per se concipitur_; from its womb all proceeds, and to it all returns; what more can be desired of an absolute? But to those with whom no critique of reason has succeeded, we should rather say—