The highest reality must be regarded rather as the ground than
as the sum-total of the possibility of all things, and the manifold
nature of things be based, not upon the limitation of the primal being
itself, but upon the complete series of effects which flow from it.
And thus all our powers of sense, as well as all phenomenal reality,
phenomenal reality, may be with propriety regarded as belonging to
this series of effects, while they could not have formed parts of
the idea, considered as an aggregate. Pursuing this track, and
hypostatizing this idea, we shall find ourselves authorized to
determine our notion of the Supreme Being by means of the mere
conception of a highest reality, as one, simple, all-sufficient,
eternal, and so on- in one word, to determine it in its
unconditioned completeness by the aid of every possible predicate. The
conception of such a being is the conception of God in its
transcendental sense, and thus the ideal of pure reason is the
object-matter of a transcendental theology.
But, by such an employment of the transcendental idea, we should
be over stepping the limits of its validity and purpose.
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