t named, not even the first
and purest fundamental representations of space and time."[21] This
act of reproduction is called 'the synthesis of reproduction in the
imagination'.[22]

[21] A. 102, Mah. 197.

[22] The term 'synthesis' is undeserved, and is due to a
desire to find a verbal parallel to the 'synthesis of
apprehension in perception'. For the inappropriateness of
'reproduction' and of 'imagination' see pp. 239-41.

Further, the necessity of reproduction brings to light a
characteristic of the synthesis of apprehension. "It is indeed only an
empirical law, according to which representations which have often
followed or accompanied one another in the end become associated, and
so form a connexion, according to which, even in the absence of the
object, one of these representations produces a transition of the mind
to another by a fixed rule. But this law of reproduction presupposes
that phenomena themselves are actually subject to such a rule, and
that in the manifold of their representations there is a concomitance
or sequence, according to a fixed rule; for, without this, our
empirical imagination would never find anything to do suited to its
capacity, and would consequently remain hidden within the depths of
the mind as a dead faculty, unknown to ourselves. If cinnabar were now
red, now black, now light, now heavy, if a man were changed now into
this, now into that animal shape, if our fields were covered on the
longest day, now with fruit, now with ice and snow, then my empirical
faculty of imagination could not even get an opportunity of thinking
of the heavy cinnabar when there occurred the representation of red
colour; or if a certain name were given now to one thing, now to
another, or if the same thing were called now by one and now by
another name, without the control of some rule, to which the phenomena
themselves are already subject, no empirical synthesis of reproduction
could take place."

"There must then be something which makes this very reproduction of
phenomena possible, by being the _a priori_ foundation of a necessary
synthetical unity of them. But we soon discover it, if we reflect that
phenomena are not things in themselves, but the mere play of our
representations, which in the end resolve themselves into
determinations of our internal sense. For if we can prove that even
our purest _a priori_ perceptions afford us no knowledge, except so
far as they contain such