Our age is the genuine age of criticism, to which a Rechtmassigkeit Kenntnisse Principien Preface A lusory knowledge, and which demands that reason should take on anew the most difficult of all its tasks, namely, that of self knowledge,a and to institute a court of justice, by which reason may secure its rightful claims while dismissing all its groundless pretensions, and this not by mere decrees but according to its own eternal and unchangeable laws; and this court is none other than the critique of pure reason itself.