also there must originate different synthetical propositions, of which the pure understanding is perfectly ignorant, for it has to do only with objects of a possible experience, the cognition and synthesis of which is always conditioned. The unconditioned, if it does really exist, must be especially considered in regard to the determinations which distinguish it from whatever is conditioned, and will thus afford us material for many a priori synthetical propositions.
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.
