“I should not be able to know that I have them, and they would therefore be for me, as a cognitive being, absolutely nothing. They might still (if I conceive myself as an animal) exist in me (a being unconscious of my own existence) as representations ..., connected according to an empirical law of association, exercising influence upon feeling and desire, and so always disporting themselves with regularity, without my thereby acquiring the least cognition of anything, not even of these my own states.”[42] As to whether Kant is justified in maintaining that the distinction between animal and human consciousness coincides with the distinction between associative and logical or reflective thinking, I am not concerned to maintain. This digression has been introduced solely for the purpose of defining more precisely the central tenets of Kant’s Critical teaching. 6. THE NATURE AND CONDITIONS OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS We have still to consider what is perhaps the most serious of all the misunderstandings to which Kant has laid himself open, and which is in large part responsible for the widespread belief that his Critical principles, when consistently developed, must finally eventuate in some such metaphysics as that of Fichte and Hegel. I refer to the view that Kant in postulating synthetic processes as conditioning consciousness is postulating a noumenal self as exercising these activities, and is therefore propounding a _metaphysical explanation_ of the synthetic, _a priori_ factors in human experience.[43]