hing is to perform a physical
operation on physical things, whereby we effect a recombination of
them on some plan, it is natural to try to resolve knowing into this
kind of doing, i. e. into making in a wide sense of the word.

In the second place, Kant never relaxed his hold upon the thing in
itself. Consequently, there always remained for him a reality which
existed in itself and was not made by us. This was to him the
fundamental reality, and the proper object of knowledge, although
unfortunately inaccessible to _our_ faculties of knowing. Hence to
Kant it did not seriously matter that an inferior reality, viz. the
phenomenal world, was made by us in the process of knowing.

In the third place, it is difficult, if not impossible, to read the
_Deduction_ without realizing that Kant failed to distinguish knowing
from that formation of mental imagery which accompanies knowing. The
process of synthesis, if it is even to seem to constitute knowledge
and to involve the validity of the categories, must really be a
process by which we construct, and recognize our construction of,
an individual reality in nature out of certain physical data.
Nevertheless, it is plain that what Kant normally describes as the
process of synthesis is really the process by which we construct an
imaginary picture of a reality in nature not present to perception,
i. e. by which we imagine to ourselves what it would look like if we
were present to perceive it. This is implied by his continued use of
the terms 'reproduction' and 'imagination' in describing the
synthesis. To be aware of an object of past perception, it is
necessary, according to him, that the object should be _re_produced.
It is thereby implied that the object of our present awareness is not
the object of past perception, but a mental image which copies or
reproduces it. The same implication is conveyed by his use of the term
'imagination' to describe the faculty by which the synthesis is
effected; for 'imagination' normally means the power of making a
mental image of something not present to perception, and this
interpretation is confirmed by Kant's own description of the
imagination as 'the faculty of representing an object even without
its presence in perception'.[37] Further, that Kant really fails
to distinguish the construction of mental imagery from literal
construction is shown by the fact that, although he insists that
the formation of an image and reproduction are both ne