The last stage, as expressed in the _Critique_, was, as we have already noted, merely an application of his earlier position that all thinking is judging. This appreciation of the inseparable connection of the categories with the act of judging is sound in principle, and is pregnant with many of the most valuable results of the Critical teaching. But these fruitful consequences follow only upon the lines developed in the _transcendental_ deduction. They are bound up with Kant’s fundamental Copernican discovery that the categories are forms of _synthesis_, and accordingly express _functions_ or _relations_. The categories can no longer be viewed, in the manner of the _Dissertation_,[703] as yielding concepts of _objects_. The view of the concept which we find in the _Dissertation_ is, indeed, applied in the _Critique_ to space and time--they are taken as in themselves intuitions, not as merely _forms_ of intuition--but the categories are recognised as being of an altogether relational character. Though _a priori_, they are not, in and by themselves, complete objects of consciousness, and accordingly can reveal no object. They are _functions_, not _contents_. That, however, is to anticipate. We must first discharge, as briefly as possible, the ungrateful task of dwelling further upon the laboured, arbitrary, and self-contradictory character of the detailed working out of the metaphysical deduction. The deduction is given in Sections II. and III. =Section II. The Logical Function of the Understanding in Judgment.=[704]--Kant’s introductory statement may here be noted. If, he says, we leave out of consideration the content of any judgment, and attend only to the mere form, we “find” that the function of thought in a judgment “can” be brought under four heads, each with three subdivisions. But Kant himself, in this same section, recognises in the frankest and most explicit manner, that the necessary distinctions are only to be obtained by taking account of the matter as well as of the form of judgments. And even after this contradiction is discounted, the term “find” may be allowed as legitimate only if the word “can” is correspondingly emphasised. The distinctions were not derived from any existing logic. They were reached only by the freest possible handling of the classifications currently employed. Examination of the table of judgments, and comparison of it with the table of categories, supply conclusive evidence that the former has been rearranged, in highly artificial fashion, so as to yield a more or less predetermined list of required categories.