ht under a
conception which constitutes knowledge. Even though it is Kant's view
that the self-consciousness need only be weak and need only arise
after the act of combination, when we are aware of its result, still,
without it, there will be no consciousness of the manifold as unified
through a conception and therefore no knowledge. Moreover, if the
self-consciousness be weak, the knowledge will be weak also, so that
if it be urged that knowledge in the strictest sense requires the full
consciousness that the manifold is unified through a conception, it
must be allowed that knowledge in this sense requires a full or clear
self-consciousness.

[28] Cf. pp. 162-9.

[29] That the combination proceeds on a specific principle
only emerges in this account of the third operation.

[30] Kant's example shows that this consciousness is not the
mere consciousness of the act of combination as throughout
identical, but the consciousness of it as an identical act of
a particular kind.

[31] When Kant says 'this conception [i. e. the conception
of the number counted] consists in the consciousness of this
unity of the synthesis', he is momentarily and contrary to
his usual practice speaking of a conception in the sense
of the activity of conceiving a universal, and not in the
sense of the universal conceived. Similarly in appealing to
the meaning of _Begriff_ (conception) he is thinking of
'conceiving' as the activity of combining a manifold through
a conception.

As is to be expected, however, the passage involves a difficulty
concerning the respective functions of the imagination and the
understanding. Is the understanding represented as only recognizing a
principle of unity introduced into the manifold by the imagination, or
as also for the first time introducing a principle of unity? At first
sight the latter alternative may seem the right interpretation. For he
says that unless we were conscious that what we are thinking is
identical with what we thought a moment ago, 'what we are thinking
would _be_ a new representation which _did not at all belong_ to the
act by which it was bound to have been gradually produced, and the
manifold of the same _would never_ constitute a whole, as lacking the
unity which only _consciousness can give it_.'[32] Again, in speaking
of a conception--which of course implies the understanding--he
says that 'it is this one consciousne