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Section Forty-one: The Third Part, Continued

25 September, 2015 - 17:22

The distinction between the ideas, or pure conceptions of Reason, and the categories or pure conceptions of the under- standing as being cognitions of quite another order, origin, and use, is so important a point in the foundation of a science, destined to contain the system of all these cognitions apriori, that without a division of this kind metaphysics would be simply impossible, or at best an incoherent, clumsy attempt at building a house of cards, without a knowledge of the materials handled, and of their capacity for this or that purpose. If the Critique of Pure Reasohad only accom- plished the direction of attention to the distinction for the first time, it would have thereby contributed more to the explanation of our conceptions and to the guidance of investigation in the field of metaphysics, than all the fruitless endeavours at solving the transcendental problems of pure Reason that have ever been undertaken, in which the suspi- cion has never occurred that the field was quite other than that of the pure understanding, and where consequently the conceptions of the understanding and Reason have been classed together as though they were of the same kind.