n. This
consciousness may often be only weak, so that we connect it with the
production of the representation only in the result but not in the act
itself, i. e. immediately; but nevertheless there must always be one
consciousness, although it lacks striking clearness, and without it
conceptions, and with them knowledge of objects, are wholly
impossible."[27]

[26] _Begriff._

[27] A. 103-4, Mah. 197-8.

Though the passage is obscure and confused, its general drift is
clear. Kant, having spoken hitherto only of the operation of the
imagination in apprehension and reproduction, now wishes to introduce
the understanding. He naturally returns to the thought of it as that
which recognizes a manifold as unified by a conception, the manifold,
however, being not a group of particulars unified through the
corresponding universal or conception, but the parts of an individual
image, e. g. the parts of a line or the constituent units of a number,
and the conception which unifies it being the principle on which these
parts are combined.[28] His main point is that it is not enough for
knowledge that we should combine the manifold of sense into a whole in
accordance with a specific principle,[29] but we must also be in some
degree conscious of our continuously identical act of combination,[30]
this consciousness being at the same time a consciousness of the
special unity of the manifold. For the conception which forms the
principle of the combination has necessarily two sides; while from our
point of view it is the principle according to which we combine and
which makes our combining activity one, from the point of view of the
manifold it is the special principle[31] by which the manifold is made
_one_. If I am to count a group of five units, I must not only add
them, but also be conscious of my continuously identical act of
addition, this consciousness consisting in the consciousness that I am
successively taking units up to, and only up to, five, and being at
the same time a consciousness that the units are acquiring the unity
of being a group of five. It immediately follows, though Kant does not
explicitly say so, that all knowledge implies self-consciousness. For
the consciousness that we have been combining the manifold on a
certain definite principle is the consciousness of our identity
throughout the process, and, from the side of the manifold, it is just
that consciousness of the manifold as unified by being broug