But, as the legislative continued to show traces of the ancient barbaric rule, her empire gradually broke up, and intestine wars introduced the reign of anarchy while the sceptics, like nomadic tribes, who hate a permanent habitation and settled mode of living, attacked from time to time those who had organized themselves into civil communities. Now, it is the fashion of the time to heap contempt and scorn upon her and the matron mourns, forlorn and forsaken, like Hecuba:Īt first, her government, under the administration of the dogmatists, was an absolute despotism. Time was, when she was the queen of all the sciences and, if we take the will for the deed, she certainly deserves, so far as regards the high importance of her object-matter, this title of honour. The arena of these endless contests is called Metaphysic. It thus falls into confusion and contradictions, from which it conjectures the presence of latent errors, which, however, it is unable to discover, because the principles it employs, transcending the limits of experience, cannot be tested by that criterion. But it quickly discovers that, in this way, its labours must remain ever incomplete, because new questions never cease to present themselves and thus it finds itself compelled to have recourse to principles which transcend the region of experience, while they are regarded by common sense without distrust.

With these principles it rises, in obedience to the laws of its own nature, to ever higher and more remote conditions. It begins with principles, which cannot be dispensed with in the field of experience, and the truth and sufficiency of which are, at the same time, insured by experience. It falls into this difficulty without any fault of its own. Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind.

The book critique of pure reason