Kant's work may be described--in its first stage--as an analysis and a criticism of experience. The term Experience is an ambiguous one. It sometimes means what has been called the 'raw material' of experience: the crude, indigested mass of poured-in _matter_-of-knowledge. If there be such a shapeless lump anywhere,--which has to be considered presently--it, at any rate, is not on Kant's view properly entitled to the name of Experience. The Given must be felt and apprehended: and--to put the point paradoxically--to be felt it must be more than felt,--it must be perceived. It must, in other words, be projected--set in space and time: let out of the mere dull inner subjectivity of feeling into the clear and distinct outer subjectivity of perception. But, again, to be perceived, it must be apperceived: to be set in time and space, it must first of all be in the hands of the unifying consciousness, which is the lord of time and space. For in so far as space and time mean a place and an order--in so far as they mean more than an empty inconceivable receptacle for bulks of sensation, in the same degree do they presuppose an intellectual, synthetic genius, which is in all its perceptions one and the same,--the fundamental, original unity of consciousness. And this analysis of experience is transcendental.' Beginning with the assumed datum--the object of or in experience--it shows that this object which is supposed to be _there_--to exist by itself and wait for perception--is created by and in the very act which apprehends it. Climbing up and rising above its habitual absorption _in_ the _thing_, consciousness (that of the philosophic observer and analyst) sees the thing in the act of making, and watches its growth.