Now in Hegel there is no such conception of thought and of _a priori_, as is found in Kant. Kant formulated the conception of thought as objective, but he interpreted this as meaning that thought subjective in itself _becomes_ objective when synthetic of a given sense-manifold. When Hegel calls thought objective he means just what he says: that there is no special, apart faculty of thought belonging to and operated by a mind existing separate from the outer world. What Hegel means by objective thought is the meaning, the significance of the fact itself; and by methods of thought he understands simply the processes in which this meaning of fact is evolved. There has been, of late, considerable discussion of the place and function of “relations” in knowledge. This discussion in English speculation, at least, tends to turn largely about Thomas Hill Green’s reconstruction of Kantianism. I consider it unfortunate that this discussion has taken the form of a debate between empiricism and Kantianism. The question of knowledge has thus come to be whether or not certain relations are supplied by thought to sensations in order to make an orderly whole out of the latter, chaotic in themselves. Now when Hegel talks of relations of thought (not that he makes much use of just this term) he means no such separate forms. Relations of thought are, to Hegel, the typical forms of meaning which the subject-matter takes in its various progressive stages of being understood. And this is what _a priori_ means from a Hegelian standpoint. It is not some element _in_ knowledge; some addition of thought to experience. It is experience itself in its skeleton, in the main features of its framework. “Refutations” of Hegel, then, which attempt to show that “thought” in itself is empty, that it waits for content from experience, that it cannot by any manipulation evolve truth out of itself are, if taken as having relevance to Hegel, simply meaningless. Hegel begins where these arguers leave off. Accepting all that they can say, he goes one step further, and denies that there is any such “thought” at all anywhere in existence. The question of the relations or “categories of thought” is just the question of the broad and main aspects of fact as that fact comes to be understood.