Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/395

THE IDEAS: THE SOUL, THE WORLD, GOD. 373 nomena to the ego as their (unknown) common subject, think all beings and events in nature as ordered under the comprehensive system of the (never to be experienced) universe, and regard all things as the work of a supreme (unknowable) intelligence. These Ideas are necessary concepts; not accidental products nor mere fancies, but concepts sprun^^-Jraiu-the oatur^—of reason ; their use is legitimate so long as we remember that we can have a problematical concept of objects corresponding to them, but no knowledge of these ; that they are problems and rules for knowledge, never objects and instruments of it. I Nevertheless the temptation to regard these regulative principles as constitutive and these problems as knowable objects is almost irresistible ; for the ground of the invol- untary confusion of the required with the given absolute lies not so much in the carelessness of the individual as in the nature of our cognitive faculty. The Ideas carry with them an unavoidable illusion of objective reality, and the sophistical inferences which spring from them are not so- phistications of men, but of pure reason itself, are natural misunderstandings from which even the wisest cannot fre6 himself. At best we can succeed in avoiding the error, not in doing away with the transcendental illusion from which it proceeds. We can see through the illusion and avoid the erroneous conclusions built upon it, not shake off the illusion itself. On this erroneous objective use of the Ideas three so- called sciences are based : speculative psychology, specu- lative cosmology, and speculative theology, which, together with ontology, constitute the stately structure of the (Wolffian) metaphysics. The Critique of Reason com. pletes its work of destruction when, as Dialectic (Logic of ^ Illusion), it follows the refutation of dogmatic ontology — ^ developed in the Analytic — which believed that it knew things in themselves through the concepts of the under- standing, with a refutation of rational psychology, rational cosmology, and rational theology. It shows that the first is founded on paralogisms, and the second entangled in irreconcilable contradictions, while the third makes vain efforts to prove the existence of the Supreme Being. '