The clash of conflicting tenets which Kant is striving to reconcile could hardly find more fitting expression than in this assertion of an _analytic synthesis_. The same conflict appears, though in a less violent form, in A 438 = B 466. “Space should properly be called not _compositum_ but _totum_, since its parts are possible only in the whole, not the whole through the parts. It might, indeed, be said to be a _compositum_ that is _ideale_, but not _reale_. That, however, is a mere subtlety.”[412] The arguments by which Kant proves space to be an _a priori_ intuition rest upon the view that _space is given as infinite_, and that _its parts arise through limitation of this prior-existent whole_. But a principle absolutely fundamental to the entire _Critique_ is the counter principle, that all analysis rests upon and presupposes a previously exercised synthesis. _Synthesis or totality as such can never be given._ Only in so far as a whole is synthetically constructed can it be apprehended by the mind. _Representation of the parts precedes and renders possible representation of the whole._ The solution of the dilemma arising out of these diverse views demands the drawing of two distinctions. First, between a synthesised totality and a principle of synthesis; the former may involve a prior synthesis; the latter does not depend upon synthesis, but expresses the predetermined nature of some special form of synthesis. Secondly, it demands a distinction between the _a priori_ manifolds of space and time and the empirical manifold which is apprehended in and through them. This, as we have already noted, is a distinction difficult to take quite seriously, and is entirely unsupported by psychological evidence. But it would seem to be insisted upon by Kant, and to have been a determining factor in the formulation of several of his main doctrines.