while logical dialectic, in the detection of sophisms,
has to do merely with an error in the logical consequence of the
propositions, or with an artificially constructed illusion, in
imitation of the natural error. There is, therefore, a natural and
unavoidable dialectic of pure reason—not that in which the bungler,
from want of the requisite knowledge, involves himself, nor that which
the sophist devises for the purpose of misleading, but that which is
an inseparable adjunct of human reason, and which, even after its
illusions have been exposed, does not cease to deceive, and
continually to lead reason into momentary errors, which it becomes
necessary continually to remove.
II.
Of Pure Reason as the Seat of Transcendental Illusory Appearance.
A.
OF REASON IN GENERAL.
All our knowledge begins with sense, proceeds thence to understanding, and ends with reason, beyond which nothing higher can be discovered in the human mind for elaborating the matter of intuition and subjecting it to the highest unity of thought. At this stage of our inquiry it is my duty to give an explanation of this, the highest faculty of cognition, and I confess I find myself here in some difficulty. Of reason, as of the understanding, there is a merely formal, that is, logical use, in which it makes abstraction of all content of cognition; but there is also a real use, inasmuch as it contains in itself the source of certain conceptions and principles, which it does not borrow either from the senses or the understanding. The former faculty has been long defined by logicians as the faculty of mediate conclusion in contradistinction to immediate conclusions (consequentiae immediatae); but the nature of the latter, which itself generates conceptions, is not to be understood from this definition. Now as a division of reason into a logical and a transcendental faculty presents itself here, it becomes necessary to seek for a higher conception of this source of cognition which shall comprehend both conceptions. In this we may expect, according to the analogy of the conceptions of the understanding, that the logical conception will give us the key to the transcendental, and that the table of the functions of the former will present us with the clue to the conceptions of reason.
