reasons, without determining what influence these ought to have on
the mind of his judges. But, lest anything he may have said may become
the innocent cause of doubt in their minds, or tend to weaken the effect
which his arguments might otherwise produce--he may be allowed to
point out those passages which may occasion mistrust or difficulty,
although these do not concern the main purpose of the present work.
He does this solely with the view of removing from the mind of the
reader any doubts which might affect his judgement of the work as a
whole, and in regard to its ultimate aim.

I know no investigations more necessary for a full insight into
the nature of the faculty which we call understanding, and at the same
time for the determination of the rules and limits of its use, than
those undertaken in the second chapter of the "Transcendental
Analytic," under the title of "Deduction of the Pure Conceptions of
the Understanding"; and they have also cost me by far the greatest
labour--labour which, I hope, will not remain uncompensated. The
view there taken, which goes somewhat deeply into the subject, has
two sides, The one relates to the objects of the pure understanding,
and is intended to demonstrate and to render comprehensible the
objective validity of its a priori conceptions; and it forms for
this reason an essential part of the Critique. The other considers
the pure understanding itself, its possibility and its powers of
cognition--that is, from a subjective point of view; and, although
this exposition is of great importance, it does not belong essentially
to the main purpose of the work, because the grand question is what
and how much can reason and understanding, apart from experience,
cognize, and not, how is the faculty of thought itself possible? As
the latter is an, inquiry into the cause of a given effect, and has
thus in it some semblance of an hypothesis (although, as I shall