The more drastic this criticism is, and the more revolutionary the view to which it reduces me, the clearer will be the contrast between what I find I know and what I thought I knew. But if these plain facts were all I had to go on, how did I reach those strange conclusions? What principles of interpretation, what tendencies to feign, what habits of inference were at work in me? For if nothing in the facts justified my beliefs, something in me must have suggested them. To disentangle and formulate these subjective principles of interpretation is transcendental criticism of knowledge.
Transcendental criticism in the hands of Kant and his followers was a sceptical instrument used by persons who were not sceptics. They accordingly imported into their argument many uncritical assumptions, such as that these tendencies to feign must be the same in everybody, that the notions of nature, history, or mind which they led people to adopt were the right or standard notions on these subjects, and that it was glorious, rather than ignominious or sophistical, to build on these principles an encyclopædia of false sciences and to call it knowledge. A true sceptic will begin by throwing over all those academic conventions as so much confessed fiction; and he will ask rather if, when all that these arbitrary tendencies to feign import into experience has been removed, any factual element remains at all. The only critical function of transcendentalism is to drive empiricism home, and challenge it to produce any knowledge of fact whatsoever. And empirical criticism will not be able to do so. Just as inattention leads ordinary people to assume as part of the given facts all that their unconscious transcendental logic has added to them, so inattention, at a deeper level, leads the empiricist to assume an existence in his radical facts which does not belong to them. In
