Buddhaism, neither know nor admit such assumptions, but carry the series of phenomena conditioning each other into infinity. Upon this point, I refer to the note appended to the criticism of the first antinomy, which occurs further on; and the reader may also see Upham's "Doctrine of Buddhaism" (p. 9), and in general all genuine accounts of the religions of Asia. Judaism and reason ought not to be identified.
Kant, who by no means desires to maintain his pretended principle of reason as objectively valid, but merely as subjectively necessary, deduces it even as such only by means of a shallow sophism, p. 307; V. 364. He says that because we seek to subsume every truth known to us under a more general truth, as far as this process can be carried, this is nothing else than the pursuit of the unconditioned, which we already presuppose. But, in truth, in this endeavour we do nothing more than apply reason, and intentionally make use of it to simplify our knowledge by enabling us to survey it — reason, which is that faculty of abstract, general knowledge that distinguishes the reflective, thinking man, endowed with speech, from the brute, which is the slave of the present. For the use of reason just consists in this, that we know the particular through the universal, the case through the rule, the rule through the more general rule; thus that we seek the most general points of view. Through such survey or general view our knowledge is so facilitated and perfected that from it arises the great difference between the life of the brutes and that of men, and again between the life of educated and that of uneducated men. Now, certainly the series of grounds of knowledge, which exist only in the sphere of the abstract, thus of reason, always finds an end in what is indemonstrable, i.e., in an idea which is not further conditioned according to this form of the principle of sufficient reason, thus in the a priori or a posteriori directly perceptible ground of the first proposition of the train of reasoning. I have already shown in the essay on
