 The emphasis on reason in this connection is important, and it links up with the project of Kant’s “critique” of pure reason. A major component of this critique involves illuminating the basis in reason for our efforts to draw erroneous metaphysical conclusions (to employ concepts “transcendentally”), despite the fact that such use has already been shown (in the Transcendental Analytic) to be illicit. What emerges in the Dialectic is a more complex story, one in which Kant seeks to disclose and critique the “transcendental ground” that leads to the misapplications of thought which characterize specific metaphysical arguments. In developing the position that our metaphysical propensities are grounded in the “very nature of human reason,” Kant (in the Introduction to the Dialectic) relies on a conception of reason as a capacity for syllogistic reasoning. This logical function of reason resides in the formal activity of subsuming propositions under ever more general principles in order to systematize, unify, and “bring to completion” the knowledge given through the real use of the understanding (A306/B363-A308/B365). Kant thus characterizes this activity as one which seeks “conditions” for everything that is conditioned. It is therefore central to this Kantian conception of reason that it is preoccupied with the “unconditioned which would stop the regress of conditions by providing a condition that is not itself conditioned in its turn.”