The conclusions arrived at in the objective deduction compelled Kant to revise his previous psychological views. Hitherto he had held to the Leibnizian theory that _a priori_ concepts are obtained by reflection upon the mind’s native and fundamental modes of action. In the _Dissertation_ he carefully distinguishes between the _logical_ and the _real_ employment of the understanding. Through the former empirical concepts are derived from concrete experience. Through the latter pure concepts are creatively generated. Logical and real thinking agree, however, Kant there argues, in being activities of the _conscious_ mind. Both can be apprehended and adequately determined through the revealing power of reflective consciousness. Such a standpoint is no longer tenable for Kant. Now that he has shown that the consciousness of self and the consciousness of objects mutually condition one another, and that until both are attained neither is possible, he can no longer regard the mind as even possibly conscious of the activities whereby experience is brought about. The activities generative of consciousness have to be recognised as themselves falling outside it. Not even in its penumbra, through some vague form of apprehension, can they be detected. Only the finished products of such activities, not the activities themselves, can be presented to consciousness; and only by general reasoning, inferential of agencies that lie outside the conscious field, can we hope to determine them. Now Kant appears to have been unwilling to regard the ‘understanding’ as ever unconscious of its activities. Why he was unwilling, it does not seem possible to explain; at most his rationalist leanings and Wolffian training may be cited as contributing causes. To the end he continued to speak of the understanding as the faculty whereby the _a priori_ is brought to consciousness. In order to develop the distinctions demanded by the new Critical attitude, he had therefore to introduce a new faculty, capable of taking over the activities which have to be recognised as non-conscious. For this purpose he selected the imagination, giving to it the special title, _productive_ imagination. The empirical reproductive processes hitherto alone recognised by psychologists are not, he declares, exhaustive of the nature of the imagination. It is also capable of _transcendental_ activity, and upon this the “objective affinity” of appearances and the resulting possibility of their empirical apprehension is made to rest. The productive imagination is also viewed as rendering possible the understanding, that is, the conscious apprehension of the _a priori_ as an element embedded in objective experience. Such apprehension is possible because in the pre-conscious elaboration of the given manifold the productive imagination has conformed to those _a priori_ principles which the understanding demands for the possibility of its own exercise in conscious apprehension.