Book II - The dialectical inferences of pure reason

Summary

It can be said that the object of a merely transcendental idea is something of which we have no concept, even though this idea is generated in an entirely necessary way by reason according to its original laws. For in fact no concept of the understanding is possible for an object that is to be adequate to the demand of reason, i.e., an object such as can be shown and made intuitive in a possible experience. But we would express ourselves better and with less danger of misunderstanding if we said that we can have no acquaintance with an object that corresponds to an idea, even though we can have a problematic concept of it.

Now at least the transcendental (subjective) reality of pure concepts of reason rests on the fact that we are brought to such ideas by a necessary syllogism. Thus there will be syllogisms containing no empirical premises, by means of which we can infer from something with which we are acquainted to something of which we have no concept, and yet to which we nevertheless, by an unavoidable illusion, give objective reality. In respect of their result, such inferences are thus to be called sophistical rather than rational inferences; even though they might lay claim to the latter term on account of what occasions them, because they are not thought up, nor do they arise contingently, but have sprung from the nature of reason. They are sophistries not of human beings but of pure reason itself, and even the wisest of all human beings cannot get free of them; perhaps after much effort he may guard himself from error, but he can never be wholly rid of the illusion, which ceaselessly teases and mocks him.