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Regulative idea

Ideas of reason such as soul, world and God yield no knowledge of objects — but as guiding threads they direct our inquiry and action.

Ideas, for Kant, are necessary concepts of reason directed at the unconditioned and thus exceeding every possible experience — no intuition corresponds to them. Used constitutively, as if they yielded knowledge of objects, they produce only illusion: the fallacies and antinomies of the old metaphysics.

Used regulatively, the same ideas are indispensable: they set the direction of inquiry, bidding us investigate nature as if it were systematically unified, and serve action as a guiding standard. They provide no knowledge — but they do provide orientation.

Source: Wikipedia: Regulative idea