The transformation must leave a determinate stock of principles unaffected; for it is undertaken simply for the sake of securing this stock, which in fact reveals its proper goal. Since we never compare the totality of hypotheses with the naked facts, but can always only oppose one hypothetical system of principles with another, more comprehensive and radial, we require for this progressive comparison an ultimately constant measure in highest principles that hold for all experience in general. ... In this sense the critical theory of experience hopes in fact to construct the universal invariant theory of experience, as it were, and thereby fulfill a demand towards which the inductive procedure itself ever more clearly presses. ... The goal of critical analysis would be attained if it succeeded in establishing in this way what is ultimately common to all possible forms of scientific experience, that is, in conceptually fixing those elements that are preserved in the progress from theory to theory, because they are the conditions of each and every theory. This goal may never be completely attained at any given stage of knowledge; nevertheless, it remains as a demand and determines a fixed direction in the continual unfolding and development of the system of experience itself.
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