This world is conditioned consequently there is an unconditioned world.
2. The Sarvāstivāda ontology classifies all the objects of knowledge within five basic categories: matter (rūpa), primary minds, secondary minds (caitta), (iv) non-associated composite phenomena which are neither matter nor associated with minds or mental factors (citta-caitta-viprayukta-saṃskāra) and (v) non-contingent or unconditioned phenomena (asaṃskṛta).
"The Philosophy of the Unconditioned" is ostensibly a review of Victor Cousin's Course de Philosophie, which had been published in Paris the previously year (1828), but the 'review' is chiefly important in its providing an occasion for Hamilton to formulate his own solution to the tension between the philosophy of common sense and the way of ideas.
The demand for the unconditioned, in turn, is essentially a demand for ultimate explanation, and links up with the rational prescription to secure systematic unity and completeness of knowledge.
At the heart of that rejection is the view that although reason is unavoidably motivated to seek the unconditioned, its theoretical efforts to achieve it are inevitably sterile.
More specifically, Kant's criticism of the metaphysical disciplines centers on his efforts to show that the ideas of reason (the soul, the world and God), which are thought in accordance with the demand for the unconditioned, get erroneously "hypostatized" by reason, or thought as mind-independent "objects" about which we might seek knowledge.
In the same way, that is, that the prescription to seek the unconditioned appears to reason as an objective principle, so too, the subjective ideas appear to reason as objects existing in a mind-independent way.
More specifically, the demand for the unconditioned, and the idea of the soul to which it gives rise, may be construed regulatively as devices for guiding inquiries, but never constitutively — never, that is, as yielding grounds for any a priori synthetic knowledge of a metaphysical self given immediately to pure reason.
More specifically, one can either think the unconditioned as an intelligible ground of appearances, or as the total (even if infinite) set of all appearances.
The Ideal represents the highest singular manifestation of reason's demand for the unconditioned.
For Schlegel "every proof is infinitely perfectible" (KA XVIII, 518, #9), and the task of philosophy is not one of searching to find an unconditioned first principle but rather one of engaging in an (essentially coherentist) process of infinite progression and approximation.
