The fundamental thesis of the Coherence theory finds explicit formulation in Kant’s doctrine of the judgment: the doctrine, that awareness is identical with the act of judging, and that judgment is always complex, involving both factual and interpretative elements. Synthetic, relational factors are present in _all_ knowledge, even in knowledge that may seem, on superficial study, to be purely analytic or to consist merely of sense-impressions. Not contents alone, but contents interpreted in terms of some specific setting, are the sole possible objects of human thought. Even when, by forced abstraction, particulars and universals are held mentally apart, they are still being apprehended through judgments, and therefore through mental processes that involve both. They stand in relations of mutual implication within a _de facto_ system; and together they constitute it. This is the reason why in modern logic, as in Kant’s _Critique_, the theory of the judgment receives so much more attention than the theory of reasoning. For once the above view of the judgment has been established, all the main points in the doctrine of reasoning follow of themselves as so many corollaries. Knowledge starts neither from sense-data nor from general principles, but from the complex situation in which the human race finds itself at the dawn of self-consciousness. That situation is organised in terms of our mental equipment; and this already existing, rudimentary system is what has made practicable further advance; to create a system _ab initio_ is altogether impossible. The starting-point does not, however, by itself alone determine our conclusions. Owing to the creative activities of the mind, regulative principles are active in all consciousness; and under their guidance the experienced order, largely practical in satisfaction of the instinctive desires, is transformed into a comprehended order, controlled in view of Ideal ends. Logic is the science of the processes whereby this transformation is brought about. An essentially metaphysical discipline, it cannot be isolated from the general body of philosophical teaching; it is not formal, but transcendental; in defining the factors and processes that constitute knowledge, its chief preoccupation is with ultimate issues.