So obvious are these inconsistencies that every commentator has felt constrained to offer some explanation of their occurrence. Thus Caird has asserted that Kant opens his exposition from the non-Critical standpoint of ordinary consciousness, and that he discloses the final position, towards which he has all along been working, only through repeated modifications of his preliminary statements. Such a view, however, cannot account either for the specific manner of occurrence or for the actual character of the contradictions of which the _Critique_ affords so many examples. These are by no means limited to the opening sections of its main divisions; and careful examination of the text shows that they have no such merely expository origin. The publication of Kant’s _Reflexionen_ and _Lose Blätter_, and the devoted labours of Benno Erdmann, Vaihinger, Adickes, Reicke and others, have, indeed, placed the issue upon an entirely new plane. It can now be proved that the _Critique_ is not a unitary work, and that in the five months in which, as Kant tells us, it was “brought to completion” (_zu Stande gebracht_), it was not actually written, but was pieced together by the combining of manuscripts written at various dates throughout the period 1772-1780. Kant’s correspondence in these years contains the repeated assertion that he expected to be able to complete the work within some three or six months. This implies that it was already, at least as early as 1777, in great part committed to writing. In 1780 Kant must therefore have had a large body of manuscript at his disposal. The recently published _Lose Blätter_ are, indeed, part of it. And as we shall have constant occasion to observe, the _Critique_ affords ample evidence of having been more or less mechanically constructed through the piecing together of older manuscript, supplemented, no doubt, by the insertion of connecting links, and modified by occasional alterations to suit the new context. Kant, it would almost seem, objected to nothing so much as the sacrifice of an argument once consecrated by committal to paper. If it could be inserted, no matter at what cost of repetition, or even confusion, he insisted upon its insertion. Thus the _Subjective_ and _Objective Deductions_ of the first edition can, as we shall find, be broken up into at least four distinct layers, which, like geological strata, remain to the bewilderment of the reader who naturally expects a unified system, but to the enlightenment of the student, once the clues that serve to identify and to date them have been detected. To cite another example: in the _Second Analogy_, as given in the first edition, the main thesis is demonstrated in no less than five distinct proofs, some of which are repetitions; and when Kant restated the argument in the second edition, he allowed the five proofs to remain, but superimposed still another upon them. Kant does, indeed, in the second