“They would then belong to no experience, would be without an object, a blind play of representations, less even than a dream.”[818] They “would be to us the same as nothing.”[819] The wording is still not altogether unambiguous, but the main point is made sufficiently clear. These paragraphs are the earliest in which traces of a genuine phenomenalism can be detected. The transcendental object, one and the same for all our knowledge, is not referred to. ‘Objects’ (in the plural) is the term which is used wherever the context permits. The empirical object is thus made to intervene between the thing in itself and the subjective representations. But the distinction between empirical objects and subjective representations on the one hand, and between empirical objects and things in themselves on the other, is not yet drawn in any really clear and definite manner. A similar phenomenalist tendency crops out in Kant’s distinction[820] between objective affinity and subjective association. “The ground of the possibility of the association of the manifold, so far as it lies in the object, is named the affinity of the manifold.” None the less Kant’s subjectivism finds one of its most decided expressions in A 114. =Third Stage.=--A 119-23 = III. β; A 116-19 = III. α; A 94-5 = I. § 14 C(oncluding paragraph); A 126-8 = III. δ; A 128-30 = S(ummary); A 123-6 = III. γ; A 115-16 = III. I(ntroduction); A 76-9 (B 102-4) = § 10 T(ransition to fourth stage). =A 119-23, III. β= (from the beginning of the seventh paragraph to the end of the twelfth). The doctrine of objective affinity already developed in the above sections is now made to rest upon a new faculty, the productive imagination. As Vaihinger remarks, the wording of this section would seem to indicate that it is Kant’s first attempt at formulating that new doctrine. He has not as yet got over his own surprise at the revolutionary nature of the conclusions to which he feels himself driven by the exigencies of Critical teaching. He finds that it is deepening into consequences which may lead very far from the current psychology and from his own previous views regarding the nature and conditions of the knowing process and of personality. As evidence that this section was not written continuously with II. 4,[1] we have the further fact that though the doctrine of objective affinity is dwelt upon, it is described afresh, with no reference to the preceding account. Also, the empirical processes of apprehension and reproduction, already mentioned in A 104-10, are now ascribed to the empirical imagination which is carefully distinguished from the productive. III. α repeats “from above” the argument given in III. β “from below.” It insists upon the close connection between the categories (first introduced in II. 4[821]) with the productive imagination of III. β.