“...it will be found that they never consist of mere intuitions
connected only (as is commonly believed) by comparison in a
judgment. They would be impossible were not a pure concept of the
understanding superadded to the concepts abstracted from
intuition. The abstract concepts are subsumed under a pure concept,
and in this manner only can they be connected in an objectively
valid judgment.”[674]
Thus the analogy between discursive and _a priori_ concepts is no sooner
drawn than it is set aside as irrelevant. Though generic concepts rest
upon functions of unity, and though (as we shall see immediately) they
exist only as factors in the total act of judging, there is otherwise
not the least resemblance between them and the categories.[675] The clue
to the categories is not to be found in the inherent characteristics of
analytic thinking, or of its specific products (namely, concepts), but
solely in what, after all abstraction, it must still retain from the
products which synthetic thinking creates. Each type of analytic
judgment will be found on examination to involve some specific function
whereby the conceptual factors are related to, and unified with, the
other elements in the judgment. This function of unity is in each case
an _a priori_ category of the understanding. That is the thesis which
underlies the concluding sentence of this section.
“The functions of the understanding [_i.e._ the _a priori_ concepts
of understanding] can be discovered in their completeness, if it is
possible to state exhaustively the functions of unity [_i.e._ the
forms of relation] in judgments.”
The adoption of such a position involves, it may be noted, the giving up
of the assertion, which is so emphatically made in the passage above
quoted, that it is _by the same activities_ that the understanding
discursively forms abstract concepts and creatively organises the
manifold of sense. That is in no respect true. There is no real
identity--there is not even analogy--between the processes of comparison
and abstraction on the one hand and those of synthetic interpretation on
the other. The former are merely reflective: the latter are genuinely
creative. Discursive activities are conscious processes, and are under
our control: the synthetic processes, are non-conscious; only their
finished products appear within the conscious field. This, however, is
to anticipate a conclusion which was among the last to be realised by
Kant himself, namely that there is no proof that these two types of
activity are ascribable to one and the same source. The synthetic
activities--as he himself finally came to hold--are due to a faculty of
imagination.
“Synthesis in general ... is the mere result of the power of
imagination, a blind but indispensable function of the soul,
without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which
we are scarcely ever conscious.”[676]