One essential difference between Kant’s earlier and later treatments of space is that in his earlier utterances it is viewed almost exclusively as a psychological _a priori_. The logical aspect of the problem first receives anything like adequate recognition in the _Analytic_. If we keep this important fact in mind, two distinct and contradictory views of the psychological nature of space intuition can be traced throughout the _Aesthetic_. On one view, it antedates experience as an actual, completed, conscious intuition. On the other view, it precedes experience only as a potential disposition. We rule ourselves out from understanding Kant’s most explicit utterances if we refuse to recognise the existence of both views. Kant’s commentators have too frequently shut their eyes to the first view, and have then blamed Kant for using misleading expressions. It is always safer to take Kant quite literally. He nearly always means exactly what he says at the time when he says it. Frequently he holds views which run completely counter to present-day psychology, and on several occasions he flatly contradicts what he has with equal emphasis maintained in other contexts. The aspects of Kant’s problems are so complex and various, and he is so preoccupied in doing complete justice to each in turn, that the question of the mutual consistency of his results is much less considered than is ideally desirable. The two views can be more explicitly formulated. The first view alone is straightforward and unambiguous. Space lies ready (_liegt bereit_) in the mind, _i.e._ it does not arise. Prior even to sense-experience it exists as a _conscious_ intuition. For this reason it can be contemplated apart from all sensation. It still remains when all sense content is thought away, and yet is not a mere form. In independence of the sensuous manifold it possesses a pure manifold of its own. The ground thesis of the second view--that space, prior to sense-experience, exists only as a permanent endowment of the mind--is likewise unambiguous. But in its development Kant throws consistency to the winds. The possible ways in which, on the second view, consciousness of space may be gained, can be tabulated as follows: (_a_) By reflection upon the activity of the mind in the construction of experience, yielding the intuition of a pure manifold; or (_b_) by reflection upon the space-endowed products of experience.[394] The latter mode of reflection may reveal: (α) A pure manifold distinct from the manifold of sense; or (β) Space as a form of the sensuous manifold.