Furthermore, the synthetic functioning of all human minds everywhere is the same. However much their sensations differ, they combine and orderly arrange their sense-materials in the same ways. The synthesis of the human mind is the source of the universality belonging to knowledge; the sensations, the “given,” are the source of the difference in knowledge. Knowledge is the result of minds that function in absolutely the same ways; and we should never have knowledge if the order and linkage of the world depended on the accident of experience. Take, for example, such laws as those of mathematics or the physical law of cause. These are the same for everybody. They are universal laws. The ordinary conception of them as independent principles of an independent nature world will not account for their necessity for everybody and their universality. As independent principles they would differ for different peoples just as sensations differ. In that case we should have no knowledge. Human beings could not then think about the same things, nor reason under the same guiding principles. However, we do think alike, we have the same geometry, the same physical laws, the same time-estimates; and simply because we function alike synthetically. Knowledge is thus the common possession of humanity because the synthetic functioning of the different individual men is identically the same. A very good way to get at Kant’s central principle of synthesis is to draw this picture. Suppose that besides the race of human beings with its own peculiar way of ordering its world, there were a race of angels endowed with its own powers, another of hobgoblins likewise endowed with its own powers, and so on to x, y, and z races――any number you please. What would be the situation? In the first place, each one of the groups would be absolutely isolated from each of the others. No one would have the power to know even the existence of the others. No one race would even have anything in common with the others. The world of each would be different. In the next place each would be trying to interpret reality, and in doing so, each would construct and order a world of reality of its own. The members of each race would have a world in common and the members would know one another. But that is all. The members of each race would not be able to get outside their own powers of synthesis. In Holy Writ the home of the angels has been sometimes described as having no time and space, but this means only that space and time are aspects of our mental synthesis and not of theirs. We live in our world of our interpretative construction of reality, and they in theirs. The same would have to be said of x, y, and z. None would live in a world of absolute reality. But each would live in a world made different from all the other worlds by the differing mental powers of each race. Yet the members of each race would inhabit a world in common because the individuals of each had common mental powers.