Kant came, no doubt, to the more consistent position of the _Aesthetic_ chiefly through further reflection upon the arguments of the _Dissertation_,[404] and especially by recognition of the fact that though reflection upon an activity of the mind may be regarded as yielding a form of intuition, it can hardly be capable of yielding a pure manifold which can be substituted for, and take the place of, the manifold of sense. There are for Kant only two ways of escape from this unhappy quandary: (_a_) Either he must return to the _Dissertation_ position, and admit that the mind is active in the construction of space. This he does in the 1790 reply to Eberhard, but only by misrepresenting his own teaching in the _Critique_. In order consistently to maintain that space is acquired by reflection upon an activity of the mind, he would have to recast the entire _Aesthetic_, as well as much of the _Analytic_, and to do so in ways which cannot genuinely harmonise with the main tendencies of his teaching.[405] (_b_) No such obstacle lay in the way of an alternative modification of his position. Kant might very easily have given up the contention that space is a pure intuition. If he had been willing to recognise that the sole possible manifold of intuition is sensuous, he could then have maintained that though space is innate as a potential form of receptivity, it is acquired only through reflection upon the space-endowed products of sensibility. So obvious are the advantages of this position, so completely does it harmonise with the facts of experience and with the teaching of modern psychology, and so obscure are the various passages in which Kant touches on this central issue, that many of his most competent commentators are prepared to regard it as being the actual teaching of the _Critique_. The evidence[406] seems to me, however, to refute this interpretation of Kant’s position. The traditional, Cartesian, semi-mystical worship of mathematical truth, as altogether independent of the contingencies of sense-experience, and as a body of knowledge absolutely distinct in origin from the merely empirical sciences, influences Kant’s thinking even at the very moment when he is maintaining, in opposition to the Cartesians, that its subject matter is a merely subjective intuition. Kant, as it would seem, still maintains that there is a pure manifold of intuition distinct from the manifold of sense; and so by the inevitable logic of his thought is constrained to view space as innate in conscious form. This is not, of course, a conclusion which he could permanently stand by, but its elimination would have involved a more radical revision of his whole view of pure intuition and of mathematical science than he was willing to undertake. Though in the _Analytic_ he has come to recognise[407] that it is acquired by reflection upon _objects_, to the end he would seem to persist in the difficult contention that such reflection yields