y in our representations.
Henceforward it is we who produce the unity by our activity of
combining the manifold. The discrepancy cannot be explained away, and
its existence can only be accounted for by the exigencies of Kant's
position. When he is asking 'What is meant by the object (beyond the
mind) corresponding to our representations?' he has to think of the
unity of the representations as due to the object. But when he is
asking 'How does the manifold of sense become unified?' his view that
all synthesis is due to the mind compels him to hold that the unity is
produced by us. In the _second_ place, the passage introduces a second
object in addition to the thing in itself, viz. the phenomenal object,
e. g. a triangle considered as a whole of parts unified on a definite
principle.[50] It is this object which, as the object that we know, is
henceforward prominent in the first edition, and has exclusive
attention in the second. The connexion between this object and the
thing in itself appears to lie in the consideration that we are only
justified in holding that the manifold of sense is related to a thing
in itself when we have unified it and therefore know it to be a unity,
and that to know it to be a unity is _ipso facto_ to be aware of it as
related to a phenomenal object; in other words, the knowledge that the
manifold is related to an object beyond consciousness is acquired
through our knowledge of its relatedness to an object within
consciousness. In the _third_ place, in view of Kant's forthcoming
vindication of the categories, it is important to notice that the
process by which the manifold is said to acquire relation to an
object is illustrated by a synthesis on a particular principle which
constitutes the phenomenal object an object of a particular kind. The
synthesis which enables us to recognize three lines as an object is
not a synthesis based on general principles constituted by the
categories, but a synthesis based on the particular principle that the
three lines must be so put together as to form an enclosed space.
Moreover, it should be noticed that the need of a particular principle
is really inconsistent with his view that relation to an object gives
the manifold the systematic unity which constitutes the conception of
an object, or that at least a [Greek: hysteron proteron] is involved.
For if the knowledge that certain representations form a systematic
unity justifies our holding that they relate to