There are thus three different ways (_a_, α, β) in which the second view can be developed: (_a_) represents the view of the _Dissertation_ (1770), of the reply to Eberhard (1790), and of those parts of the first edition’s deduction of the categories which are of very early origin; (α) represents the final standpoint of the _Analytic_; (β), the prevailing view of the present day, is nowhere accepted by Kant.[395] Kant’s utterances in the _Aesthetic_ are all of them coloured by the first main view. We can best approach them by way of the contrasted teaching of the _Dissertation_ of 1770. The teaching there formulated practically coincides, as above stated, with (_a_) of the second main view. Space, he maintains, is neither innate nor acquired from sense-experience. “Certainly both conceptions [of time and of space] are undoubtedly acquired, not indeed by abstraction from our sensations of objects (for sensation gives the matter, not the form of human cognition), but from the mind’s own action in co-ordinating its sensations in accordance with unchanging laws. Each represents, as it were, an immutable type, and so can be known intuitively. Sensations excite this act of mind but do not contribute to the intuition. There is here nothing innate except this law of the mind according to which it conjoins in a certain manner the sensations derived from the presence of some object.”[396] How this view is to be reconciled with the contention, no less explicitly maintained,[397] that space is not only a form of intuition but itself a pure intuition, Kant does not make clear. Reflection upon an activity of the mind may yield the representation of space as a form; it is difficult to comprehend how it should also yield an _a priori_ content. Kant nowhere in the _Critique_ directly discusses the question whether the representation of space is innate or acquired. Such suggestions as occur refer (with the solitary exceptions of A 196 = B 241 and B 166 ff.)[398] only to the categories,[399] or as in the _Prolegomena_[400] to the Ideas of reason. But in 1790 Kant in his reply to Eberhard[401] again formulates the view of the _Dissertation_. The _Critique_ allows, he there says, of no innate representations. All, without exception, are acquired. But of certain representations there is an original acquisition (_ursprüngliche Erwerbung_). Their ground (_Grund_) is inborn. In the case of space this ground is the mind’s peculiar capacity for acquiring sensations in accordance with its subjective constitution.[402]