transcendence run confusedly into each other. It is indeed clear that whoever raises the first question about the possibility of genuine (real) transcendence is at the same time really also raising the second question: namely, how can there be transcendence beyond the realm of evident givenness? In this there is the unspoken supposition that the only actually understandable, unquestionable, absolutely evident givenness is the givenness of the abstract part genuinely (reel) contained within the cognitive act, / and this is why anything in the way of a cognized objectivity that is not genuinely (reel) contained within that act is regarded as a puzzle and as problematic. We shall soon hear that this is a fatal mistake. 
One may now construe transcendence in one sense or the other, or, at first even ambiguously, but transcendence is both the initial and the central problem of the critique of cognition. It is the riddle that stands in the path of cognition of the natural sort and is the incentive for new investigations. One could at the outset designate the solution to this problem as being the task of the critique of cognition. One would thereby delimit the new discipline in a preliminary fashion, instead of generally designating as its theme the problem of the essence of any cognition whatever. 

If then the riddle connected with the initial establishment of the discipline lies here, it becomes more definitely clear what must not be claimed as presupposed. Nothing transcendent must be used as a presupposition. If I do not understand how it is possible that cognition reach something transcendent, then I also do not know whether it is possible. The scientific warrant for believing in a transcendent existence is of no help. For every mediated warrant goes back to something immediate; and it is the unmediated which contains the riddle. 

Still someone might say: "It is certain that mediated no less than immediate cognition contains the riddle. But it is only the how that is puzzling, whereas the that is absolutely certain. No sensible man will doubt the existence of the world, and the sceptic in action belies his own creed." Very well. Then let us answer him with a more powerful and far-reaching argument. For it proves that the theory of cognition has, neither at the outset nor throughout its course, any license to fall back upon the content of the sciences of a natural sort which treat their object as transcendent. What is proved is the fundamental thesis that the theory of knowledge can never be based upon any science of the natural sort, no matter what the more specific nature of that science may be. Hence we ask: What will our opponent do