an) metaphysics. The Critique of Reason completes its work
of destruction when, as Dialectic (Logic cf. Illusion), it follows the
refutation of dogmatic ontology--developed in the Analytic--which
believed that it knew things in themselves through the concepts of
the understanding, with a refutation of rational psychology, rational
cosmology, and rational theology. It shows that the first is founded on
paralogisms, and the second entangled in irreconcilable contradictions,
while the third makes vain efforts to prove the existence of the Supreme
Being.

(i) _The Paralogisms of Rational Psychology_. The transcendental
self-consciousness or pure ego which accompanies and connects all my
representations, the subject of all judgments which I form, is, as the
Analytic recognized, the presupposition of all knowing (pp. 358-359), but
as such it can never become an object of knowledge. We must not make
a given object out of the subject which never can be a predicate, nor
substitute a real thinking substance for the logical subject of thought,
nor revamp the unity of self-consciousness into the simplicity and
identical personality of the soul. The rational psychology of the Wolffian
school is guilty of this error, and whatever of proof it advances for the
substantiality, simplicity, and personality of the soul, and, by way
of deduction, for its immateriality and immortality as well as for its
relation to the body, is based upon this substitution, this ambiguity of
the middle term, and therefore upon a _quaternio terminorum_,--all its
conclusions are fallacious. It is allowable and unavoidable to add in
thought an absolute subject, the unity of the ego, to inner phenomena;[1]
it is inadmissible to treat the Idea of the soul as a knowable thing. In
order to be able to apply the category of substance to it, we would have to
lay hold of a permanent in intuition such as cannot be found in the inner
sense. Empirical psychology, then, alone remains for the extension of our
knowledge of mental life, while rational psychology shrivels up from
a doctrine into a mere discipline, which watches that the limits of
experience are not overstepped. But even as a mere limiting determination
it has great value. For, along with the hope of proving the immateriality
and immortality of the soul, the fear of seeing them _disproved_ is also
dissipated; materialism is just as unfounded as spiritualism, and if the
conclusions of the latter concerning the so