ition that we must be capable of being conscious of our
identity with respect to all of them, or from both?

[56] _Objecte ueberhaupt_, i. e. objects of any kind in
distinction not from objects of a particular kind but from no
objects at all.

[57] A. 111, Mah. 204

Prima facie the second position is the more plausible basis for the
desired conclusion. On the one hand, it does not seem obvious that the
manifold _must_ be capable of being related to an object; for even if
it be urged that otherwise we should have only 'a random play of
representations, less than a dream'[58], it may be replied, that this
might be or might come to be the case. On the other hand, the fact
that our representations are ours necessarily seems to presuppose that
we are identical subjects of these representations, and recognition of
this fact is the consciousness of our identity.

[58] A. 112, Mah. 204.

If we turn to the text for an answer to this question, we find that
Kant seems not only to use both starting-points, but even to regard
them as equivalents. Thus in introducing the categories[59] Kant
begins by appealing to the necessity for knowledge that
representations should relate to an object.

[59] A. 110-12, Mah. 203-4.

"Unity of synthesis according to empirical conceptions would be purely
contingent, and were these not based on a transcendental ground of
unity, it would be possible for a confused crowd of phenomena to fill
our soul, without the possibility of experience ever arising
therefrom. But then also all relation of knowledge to objects would
fall away, because knowledge would lack connexion according to
universal and necessary laws; it would be thoughtless perception but
never knowledge, and therefore for us as good as nothing."

"The _a priori_ conditions of any possible experience whatever are at
the same time conditions of the possibility of the objects of
experience. Now I assert that the above mentioned _categories_ are
nothing but _the conditions of thinking in any possible experience_,
just as _space and time_ are the _conditions of perception_ requisite
for the same. The former therefore are also fundamental conceptions by
which we think objects in general for phenomena, and are therefore
objectively valid _a priori_--which is exactly what we wished to
know."

The next sentence, however, bases the necessity of the categories on
the possibility of self-consciousness, without giving an