Kant’s language is frequently ambiguous. The Leibnizian spiritualism, to which in his pre-Critical period he had unquestioningly held, continued to influence his terminology, and so to prevent his Critical principles from obtaining consistent expression. This much can be said in support of the above interpretation of Kant’s position. But in all other respects such a reading of his philosophy is little better than a parody of his actual teaching. For Kant is very well aware that the problem of knowledge is not to be solved in any such easy and high-handed fashion. In the _Critique_ he teaches quite explicitly that to profess to explain the presence of _a priori_ factors in human experience by means of a self assumed for that very purpose would be a flagrant violation, not only of Critical principles, but even of the elementary maxims of scientific reasoning. In the first place, explanation by reference to the activities of such a self would be explanation by faculties, by the unknown; it is a cause that will explain anything and everything equally well or badly.[44] Self-consciousness has, indeed, to be admitted as a fact;[45] and from its occurrence Kant draws important conclusions in regard to the conditions which make experience possible. But, in so doing, Kant never intends to maintain that we are justified in postulating as part of those conditions, or as condition of those conditions, a noumenal self. The conditions which make experience possible, whatever they may be, are also the conditions which make self-consciousness possible. Since the self is known only as appearance, it cannot be asserted to be the conditioning ground of appearance. This first objection is not explicitly stated by Kant, but it is implied in a second argument which finds expression both in the _Deduction of the Categories_ and in the chapter on the _Paralogisms_. The only self that we know to exist is the _conscious_ self. Now, as Kant claims to have proved, the self can be thus conscious, even of itself, only in so far as it is conscious of objects. Consequently we have no right to assume that the self can precede such consciousness as its generating cause. That would be to regard the self as existing prior to its own conditions, working in darkness to create itself as a source of light.