ABSTRACT

The primary aim of the Dialectic is the exposure of metaphysical illusion; the primary instrument of exposure is the principle of significance. Kant advances, as I earlier remarked, a secondary thesis to the effect that certain ideas for which no empirical conditions of application can be specified and which are therefore a source of illusion if taken as relating to objects of possible knowledge may nevertheless have a useful, and even a necessary, function in the extension of empirical knowledge, when employed in a different way, which he entitles "regulative". Such ideas are those of God, and of the soul conceived of as a simple immaterial substance. Though it would be illusion to think we can have knowledge, or even form any definite conception, of objects corresponding to either idea, yet advances in psychology and in science in general, Kant holds, are assisted by, even dependent on, thinking of inner states as if they were states of an immaterial substance and thinking of the natural world in general as if it were the creation of a divine intelligence. So to think is to make a regulative employment of these ideas. Kant's contention that such a use of the ideas is natural, even necessary, to human reason, when it is busy with scientific matters, is evidently quite unplausible. But it becomes clearer why he should have held this view when we consider the general structure of the Dialectic.