In calling his new logic “transcendental” Kant, it is true, also intends to signify that it is supplementary to, not a substitute for, the older logic, which he professes to accept.[30] Moreover his intuitional theory of mathematical science, his doctrine of the “pure concept,” his attributive view of the judgment--all of them survivals from his pre-Critical period[31]--frequently set him at cross-purposes with himself. His preoccupation, too, with the problem of the _a priori_ leads him to underestimate the part played in knowledge by the merely empirical. But despite all inconsistencies, and notwithstanding his perverse preference for outlandish modes of expression, he succeeds in enforcing with sufficient clearness the really fundamental tenets of the Coherence view. 3. THE NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS I shall now approach Kant’s central position from another direction, namely, as an answer to the problem of the nature of consciousness. We are justified, I think, in saying that Kant was the first in modern times to raise the problem of the nature of awareness, and of the conditions of its possibility. Though Descartes is constantly speaking of consciousness, he defines it in merely negative terms, through its opposition to matter; and when he propounds the question how material bodies can be known by the immaterial mind, his mode of dealing with it shows that his real interest lies not in the nature of consciousness but in the character of the existences which it reveals. His answer, formulated in terms of the doctrine of representative perception, and based on the supposed teaching of physics and physiology, is that material bodies through their action on the sense-organs and brain generate images or duplicates of themselves. These images, existing not in outer space but only in consciousness, are, he asserts, mental in nature; and being mental they are, he would seem to conclude, immediately and necessarily apprehended by the mind. Thus Descartes gives us, not an analysis of the knowing process, but only a subjectivist interpretation of the nature of the _objects_ upon which it is directed.