We have shown in the introduction to this part of our work that every transcendental illusion of pure reason rests on dialectical inferences, whose schema is provided in general by logic in the three formal species of syllogisms, just as the categories find their logical schema in the four functions of all judgments. The first species of these sophistical inferences had to do with the unconditioned unity of the subjective conditions of all representations in general (of the subject or the soul), corresponding to the categorical syllogisms, whose major premise, as a principle, states the relation of a predicate to a subject. Thus the second species of dialectical argument, by analogy with hypothetical syllogisms, will make the unconditioned unity of objective conditions in appearance its content, just as the third species, which will come forward in the following chapter, has as its theme the unconditioned unity of objective conditions of the possibility of objects in general.

It is remarkable, however, that the transcendental paralogism effects a merely one-sided illusion regarding the idea of the subject of our thought, and for the opposite assertion there is not the least plausibility forthcoming from concepts of reason. The advantage is entirely on the side of pneumatism, even though pneumatism cannot deny that radical defect through which its entire plausibility dissolves into mere haze when put to the fiery test of critique.