"The manifold content in our re-presentations can be given in an intuition which is merely sensuous--in other words, is nothing but susceptibility; and the form of this intuition can exist _a priori_ in our faculty of representation, without being anything else but the mode in which the subject is affected. But the conjunction (_conjunctio_) of a manifold in intuition never can be given by the senses; it cannot therefore be contained in the pure form of sensuous intuition, for it is a spontaneous act of the faculty of re-presentation. And as we must, to distinguish it from sensibility, entitle this faculty _understanding_, so all conjunction, whether conscious or unconscious, be it of the manifold in intuition, sensuous or non-sensuous, or of several conceptions, is an act of the understanding. To this act we shall give the general appellation of _synthesis_, thereby to indicate, at the same time, that _we cannot represent anything as conjoined in the object without having previously conjoined it ourselves_." As to comprehend this paragraph is to analyze the universe, let us grapple with it. Impatient Dr. Sam. Johnson once kicked a stone to refute Berkeley. Let us take that stone, as a clump of matter, and treat it with the head instead of the foot. "The manifold content in our re-presentations," says Kant, "can be given in an intuition which is merely sensuous." This means simply that the various properties of the "re-presentation" or "intuition" called a stone are "effects on the senses." The color, the texture, the weight, the size--every one of all such "material" attributes--exist, as they are, solely by relation to _me_, or to some other being in whom is organized the element of "sense." Matter is _made_ of impact--impact between its objective background ("the noumenon" or "noumena") and some sort or degree of subjectivity. Without these two terms, their product of interaction, their third term, matter, is _not_. So "the manifold content" of a "re-presentation"--or, what is the same thing, the properties of a material object--are "nothing but susceptibility."