Transcendental Doctrine of Method

The Transcendental Doctrine of Elements examined the materials of the abstract human mind.

This let us build a home on Earth. But the lack of materials prevented us from building to go to the Heaven and sky.

We reach heaven by a plan to use the materials to build a path to go to heaven.

This plan is the transcendental doctrine of method.

It determines the formal conditions of a complete system of pure reason.

CHAPTER 1. The Discipline of Pure Reason

Negative judgements are the jealous enemies of our insatiable desire for knowledge.

All propositions may be logically expressed in a negative form.

The purpose of negative judgements is solely to prevent error.

An example is the schoolman proposition that Alexander could not have subdued any country without an army.

The negative element in knowledge is much more important than much of that positive instruction which adds to our knowledge.

Discipline is the restraint employed to repress and extirpate the constant inclination to depart from certain rules.

Culture aims to form a certain degree of skill, without repressing or destroying any other existing mental power.

Discipline is different from culture.

In the cultivation of talent for self-development:

• culture and doctrine is positive
• discipline is negative*

Examples of natural dispositions and talents are imagination and wit.

These ask a free and unlimited development. These require the corrective influence of discipline.

The proper duty of reason is to prescribe rules of discipline to all the other powers of the mind.

• It is strange that reason requires this corrective discipline.

It has hitherto escaped this humiliation only because no one saw it capable of substituting:

• fancies for conceptions, and
• words for things.

When reason is employed in experience, it does not need criticism. This is because its principles are subjected to the continual test of empirical observations.

Criticism is not needed in mathematics where:

• the conceptions of reason must always be presented in concreto in pure intuition
• baseless or arbitrary assertions are discovered easily.

But where reason is not held in a plain track by the influence of empirical or of pure intuition, that is,

But when reason is employed in the transcendental sphere of pure conceptions, it needs great discipline:

• to restrain its propensity to overstep the limits of possible experience and
• to keep it from wandering into error.

In fact, the utility of the philosophy of pure reason is entirely of this negative character.

Particular errors may be corrected by particular animadversions. The causes of these errors may be eradicated by criticism.

But where we find, as in the case of pure reason, a complete system of illusions and fallacies, closely connected with each other and depending on grand general principles, there seems to be required a peculiar and negative code of mental laws.

These laws:

• are a discipline, founded on the nature of reason and the objects of its exercise.
• constitute a system of thorough examination and testing, which no disguised fallacy will be able to withstand or escape from

This Division 2 of my transcendental Critique of the discipline of pure reason is not directed to the content, but to the method of the cognition of pure reason.

The content has been completed in the doctrine of elements.

There is so much similarity in the mode of employing reason in whatever object.

But its employment in the transcendental sphere is so essentially different from every other.

Without the warning negative influence of a discipline specially directed to that end, errors will be unavoidable.

Those errors spring from the unskillful employment of the methods which are originated by reason but out of place in this sphere.