THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 361 



tliougli equally essential, elements. Tlie ' Manifoldness ' of 

 the Object is due to Sensibility, which per se is chaotic, 

 and the unit}^ is due to the synthetic handling which this 

 Manifold receives from the higher faculties of Intuition, 

 Apprehension, Imagination, Understanding, and Appercep- 

 tion. It is the one essential spontaneity of the Under- 

 standing which, under these different names, brings unity 

 into the manifold of sense. 



"The Understauding is, in fact, nothing more than the faculty of 

 "binding together a priori, and of bringing the Manifold of given ideas 

 under the unity of Apperception, which consequently b the supreme 

 principle in all human knowledge"' (§ 16j. 



The material connected must be given by lower fac- 

 ulties to the Understanding, for the latter is not an intui- 

 tive faculty, but by nature * empty.' And the bringing of 

 this material ' under the unity of Apperception ' is ex- 

 plained by Kant to mean the thinking it always so that, 

 wdiatever its other determinations be, it may be known as 

 ■thougJd by me.* Though this consciousness, that / think 

 it, need not be at every moment explicitly realized, it is 

 always capable of being realized. For if an object incapable 

 of being combined with the idea of a thinker were there, 

 how could it be known, how related to other objects, how 

 form part of ' experience ' at all ? 



The awareness that I think is therefore implied in all ex- 

 perience. No connected consciousness of anything without 

 that of Self as its presupposition and ' transcendental ' condi- 

 tion ! All things, then, so far as they are intelligible at all, 

 are so through combination with pure consciousness of Self, 



*It must be noticed, in justice to what was said above on page 274 ff., 

 that neither Kant nor his successors anj^where discriminate between the 

 presence of the apperceiving Ego to the combined oliject. and the aware- 

 ness by that Ego <?f its own presence and of its distinctness from what it 

 apperceives. That the Object must be known to something which thinks, 

 and that it must be known to something which thinks that it thinks, are 

 treated by them as identical necessities, — by what logic, docs not appear. 

 Kant tries to soften the jump in the reasoning by saying the thought of it' 

 self on the part of the Ego need onl}" be -potential — " the 'I tliink ' must he 

 capable of accompanying all other knowledge "—but a thought which is 

 only potential is actually no thougiit at all, which practically gives up th# 

 <iase. 



