Unfortunately Kant, for the reasons just stated, has not sufficiently emphasised this more negative, or rather noncommittal, aspect of the results of the deduction. But when later in the chapter on the _Paralogisms_ he is brought face to face with the issue, and has occasion to pronounce upon the question, he speaks with no uncertain voice. In the theoretical sphere there is, he declares, no sufficient proof of the spirituality, or unitary and ultimate character, of the self. Like everything else the unity of apperception must be noumenally conditioned, but it cannot be shown that in itself, _as self-consciousness or apperception_, it represents any noumenal reality. It may be a resultant, resting upon, and due to, a complexity of generative conditions; and these conditions may be fundamentally different in character from itself. They may, for all that we can prove to the contrary, be of a non-conscious and non-personal nature. There is nothing in our cognitive experience, and no result of the Critical analysis of it, which is inconsistent with such a possibility.[919] Those commentators, such as Cohen, Caird, and Watson, who more or less follow Hegel in his criticism of Kant’s procedure, give an interpretation of the transcendental deduction which makes it inconsistent with the sceptical conclusions which the _Critique_ as a whole is made by its author to support. Unbiassed study of the _Analytic_, even if taken by itself in independence of the _Dialectic_, does not favour such a view. The argument of the transcendental deduction itself justifies no more than Kant is willing to allow in his discussion of the nature of the self in the section on the _Paralogisms_. It may, indeed, as Caird has so forcibly shown in his massive work upon the Critical philosophy, be developed upon Hegelian lines, but only through a process of essential reconstruction which departs very far from many of Kant’s most cherished tenets, and which does so in a spirit that radically conflicts with that which dominates the _Critique_ as a whole. THE LATER STAGES OF THE SUBJECTIVE DEDUCTION The reader will have noted that several of the factors in Kant’s exposition have so far been entirely ignored. The time has now come for reckoning with them. They constitute, in my view, the later stages of the subjective deduction. That is to say, they refer to the transcendental generative powers which Kant, _on the strength of the results obtained in the more objective enquiry_, feels justified in postulating. Separate consideration of them tends to clearness of statement. Kant’s constant alternation between the logical and the dynamical standpoints is one of the many causes of the obscurity in his argument. In this connection we shall also find opportunity to discuss the fundamental conflict, to which I have already had occasion to refer, between the subjectivist and the phenomenalist modes of developing the Critical standpoint.