Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.

The image of metaphysics as a shoreless, unlit ocean captures the sense that, when reason ventures beyond possible experience, it loses reliable bearings. Read in a broadly Kantian key, the “wrecks” are the repeated failures of earlier systems that tried to prove substantive truths about God, the soul, or the cosmos by pure speculation. The metaphor underscores a central critical claim: metaphysical inquiry is not worthless, but it requires a “lighthouse”—a method that marks limits and conditions of knowledge—otherwise it drifts into illusion and contradiction. The line thus expresses skepticism toward dogmatic metaphysics and a demand for disciplined critique as navigation.