But it is in dealing with the synthesis of _recognition_ that the argument is most obscure. It is idle attempting to discover any possible distinction between an empirical and a transcendental process of recognition. For the transcendental process here appears as being the consciousness that what we are thinking now is the same as what we thought a moment before; and it is illustrated not by reference to the pure intuitions of space and time, but only by the process of counting. It may be argued that empirical recognition is mediated by transcendental factors--by pure concepts and by apperception. But unless we are to take transcendental recognition as synonymous with transcendental apperception, which Kant’s actual teaching does not seem to justify us in doing, such considerations will not enable us to distinguish two forms of recognition. Apart, however, from this difficulty, there is the further one that the concepts in and through which the recognition is executed are here described as being empirical. The only key that will solve the mystery of this extraordinary section, hopelessly inexplicable when viewed as a single continuous whole, is, it would seem, the theory of Vaihinger, namely,[839] that from the third paragraph onwards (already dealt with as forming the first stage of the deduction) Kant is making use of manuscript which represents the _earliest_ form in which his explanation of the consciousness of objects was developed, with the strange result that this section is a combination of the latest and of the earliest forms of the deduction. While seeking to make out a parallelism between the empirical, conscious activities of imagination and understanding on the one hand, and its transcendental functions on the other, he must have bethought himself of the earlier attempt to explain consciousness of objects through empirical concepts conditioned by transcendental apperception, and so have attempted to expound the third form of synthesis by means of it. As thus extended it involves a distinction between transcendental and empirical apperception, and upon that the discussion, so far as it concerns anything akin to recognition, altogether turns. But there is not the least further mention of recognition itself. As transcendental, it cannot be taken as the equivalent of empirical apperception; and as a synthesis through concepts, can hardly coincide with pure apperception. The title of the section, “the synthesis of recognition in the concept,” is thus no real indication of the astonishing fare prepared for the reader. The doctrine of a threefold synthesis seems to have occurred to Kant on the very eve of the publication of the _Critique_. The passage expounding it may well have been hurriedly composed, and when unforeseen difficulties accumulated, especially in regard to recognition as a transcendental process, Kant must have resolved simply to close the matter by inserting the older manuscript.