| SS 6. SECTION III. Of the Pure Conceptions of the Understanding, or Categories. |
| General logic, as has been repeatedly said, makes abstraction of all content of cognition, and expects to receive representations from some other quarter, in order, by means of analysis, to convert them into conceptions. |
| On the contrary, transcendental logic has lying before it the manifold content of a priori sensibility, which transcendental aesthetic presents to it in order to give matter to the pure conceptions of the understanding, without which transcendental logic would have no content, and be therefore utterly void. |
| Now space and time contain an infinite diversity of determinations of pure a priori intuition, but are nevertheless the condition of the mind's receptivity, under which alone it can obtain representations of objects, and which, consequently, must always affect the conception of these objects. |
| But the spontaneity of thought requires that this diversity be examined after a certain manner, received into the mind, and connected, in order afterwards to form a cognition out of it. |
| This Process I call synthesis. |
| By the word synthesis, in its most general signification, I understand the process of joining different representations to each other and of comprehending their diversity in one cognition. |
| This synthesis is pure when the diversity is not given empirically but a priori (as that in space and time). |
| Our representations must be given previously to any analysis of them; and no conceptions can arise, quoad their content, analytically. |
| But the synthesis of a diversity (be it given a priori or empirically) is the first requisite for the production of a cognition, which in its beginning, indeed, may be crude and confused, and therefore in need of analysis--still, synthesis is that by which alone the elements of our cognitions are collected and united into a certain content, consequently it is the first thing on which we must fix our attention, if we wish to investigate the origin of our knowledge. |
| Synthesis, generally speaking, is, as we shall afterwards see, the mere operation of the imagination--a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no cognition whatever, but of the working of which we are seldom even conscious. |
| But to reduce this synthesis to conceptions is a function of the understanding, by means of which we attain to cognition, in the proper meaning of the term. |
| Pure synthesis, represented generally, gives us the pure conception of the understanding. |
| But by this pure synthesis, I mean that which rests upon a basis of a priori synthetical unity. |
| Thus, our numeration (and this is more observable in large numbers) is a synthesis according to conceptions, because it takes place according to a common basis of unity (for example, the decade). |
| By means of this conception, therefore, the unity in the synthesis of the manifold becomes necessary. |
| By means of analysis different representations are brought under one conception--an operation of which general logic treats. |
| On the other hand, the duty of transcendental logic is to reduce to conceptions, not representations, but the pure synthesis of representations. |
| The first thing which must be given to us for the sake of the a priori cognition of all objects, is the diversity of the pure intuition; the synthesis of this diversity by means of the imagination is the second; but this gives, as yet, no cognition. |
| The conceptions which give unity to this pure synthesis, and which consist solely in the representation of this necessary synthetical unity, furnish the third requisite for the cognition of an object, and these conceptions are given by the understanding. |
| The same function which gives unity to the different representation in a judgement, gives also unity to the mere synthesis of different representations in an intuition; and this unity we call the pure conception of the understanding. |