The principles resulting from this highest principle of pure reason
will, however, be transcendent in relation to phenomena, that is to
say, it will be impossible to make any adequate empirical use of this
principle. It is therefore completely different from all principles of
the understanding, the use made of which is entirely immanent, their
object and purpose being merely the possibility of experience. Now our
duty in the transcendental dialectic is as follows. To discover whether
the principle that the series of conditions (in the synthesis of
phenomena, or of thought in general) extends to the unconditioned is
objectively true, or not; what consequences result therefrom affecting
the empirical use of the understanding, or rather whether there exists
any such objectively valid proposition of reason, and whether it is
not, on the contrary, a merely logical precept which directs us to
ascend perpetually to still higher conditions, to approach completeness
in the series of them, and thus to introduce into our cognition the
highest possible unity of reason. We must ascertain, I say, whether
this requirement of reason has not been regarded, by a
misunderstanding, as a transcendental principle of pure reason, which
postulates a thorough completeness in the series of conditions in
objects themselves. We must show, moreover, the misconceptions and
illusions that intrude into syllogisms, the major proposition of which
pure reason has supplied—a proposition which has perhaps more of the
character of a petitio than of a postulatum—and that proceed from
experience upwards to its conditions. The solution of these problems is
our task in transcendental dialectic, which we are about to expose even
at its source, that lies deep in human reason. We shall divide it into
two parts, the first of which will treat of the transcendent
conceptions of pure reason, the second of transcendent and dialectical
syllogisms.
TRANSCENDENTAL DIALECTIC—BOOK I—OF THE CONCEPTIONS OF PURE REASON.
The conceptions of pure reason—we do not here speak of the possibility
of them—are not obtained by reflection, but by inference or conclusion.
The conceptions of understanding are also cogitated à priori
antecedently to experience, and render it possible; but they contain
nothing but the unity of reflection upon phenomena, in so far as these
must necessarily belong to a possible empirical consciousness. Through
them alone are cognition and the determination of an object possible.
It is from them, accordingly, that we receive material for reasoning,
and antecedently to them we possess no à priori conceptions of objects
from which they might be deduced, On the other hand, the sole basis of
their objective reality consists in the necessity imposed on them, as
containing the intellectual form of all experience, of restricting
their application and influence to the sphere of experience.