The absolute totality of the series of these conditions in the derivation of their members is an idea which of course can never come about fully in the empirical use of reason, but nevertheless serves as a rule for the way we ought to proceed in regard to them: namely that in the explanation of given appearances (in a regress or ascent), we ought to proceed as if the series were in itself infinite,.e., proceed in indefinitum;' but where reason itself is considered as the determining cause (in the case of freedom), hence in the case of practical principles,d we should proceed as if we did not have before us an objecte of sense but one of pure understanding, where the conditions can no longer be posited in the series of appearances, but are posited outside it, and the series of states can be regarded as if it began absolutely (through an intelligible cause); all this proves that the cosmological ideas are nothing but regulative principles/ and are far from positing, as it were constitutively, an actual totality in such series.