ABSTRACT

The basis of the systematic structure of illusion, as of knowledge, is held to lie in formal logic. Just as the experience-ordering concepts of understanding are correlated with the fundamental logical forms of statement, so the illusion-begetting ideas of reason are correlated with the fundamental forms of mediate deductive inference. The reader of the Critique is already very thoroughly prepared by the discussions of the Transcendental Analytic for the general topic of metaphysical illusion. With the end of the Transcendental Analytic comes the end of Immanuel Kant's positive or constructive metaphysics of experience. The exhibition of that necessary structure of fundamental ideas which constitutes the framework of people thinking about the world is now complete. But Kant thought that the phrase "the demand of reason for the unconditioned" embodied a description, both precise and general, of the sources of all the metaphysical ideas discussed in the Dialectic.