fied, and how? Can this end
be attained, and reality be given to the Ideas? This is the third question
of the Critique of Reason.

%(c) The Reason's Ideas of the Unconditioned (Transcendental
Dialectic).%--"All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds thence to
the understanding, and ends with reason." The understanding is the
faculty of rules, reason the faculty of principles. The categories of the
understanding are necessary concepts which make experience possible, and
which, therefore, can always be given in experience; the Ideas of reason
are necessary concepts to which no corresponding object can be given. Each
of the Ideas gives expression to an unconditioned. How does the concept of
the unconditioned arise, and what service does it perform for knowledge?

As perceptions are connected by the categories in the unity of the
understanding, and thus are elevated into experience, so the manifold
knowledge of experience needs a higher unity, the unity of reason, in order
to form a connected system. This is supplied to it by the Ideas--which,
consequently, do not relate directly to the objects of intuition, but only
to the understanding and its judgments--in order, through the concept
of the unconditioned, to give completion to the knowledge of the
understanding, which always moves in the sphere of the conditioned, _i.e._,
to give it the greatest possible unity together with the greatest possible
extension. The concept of the absolute grows out of the logical task which
is incumbent on reason, _i.e._, inference, and it may be best explained
from this as a starting point. In the syllogism the judgment asserted in
the conclusion is derived from a general rule, the major premise. The
validity of this general proposition is, however, itself conditional,
dependent on higher conditions. Then, as reason seeks the condition for
each conditioned moment, and always commands a further advance in
the series of conditions, it acts under the Idea of _the totality
of conditions_, which, nevertheless, since it can never be given in
experience, does not denote an object, but only an heuristic maxim for
knowledge, the maxim, namely, never to stop with any one condition as
ultimate, but always to continue the search further. The Idea of the
unconditioned or of the completeness of conditions is a goal which we never
attain, but which we are continually to approach. The categories and the
principles of the understanding were _constitut