“An a priori concept not referring to experience would be the logical form only of a concept, but not the concept itself by which something is thought.”[815]
A 110-14, II. 4.—In this section also the argument starts afresh, indicating (if such evidence were required) that, like I. § 14, it must have been written independently of its present context. But the argument is now advanced one step further. The categories are recognised as simultaneously conditioning both unity of consciousness and objectivity.
“There is but one experience ... as there is but one space and one time....” “The a priori conditions of a possible experience are at the same time conditions of the possibility of objects of experience”[816] “...the necessity of these categories rests on the relation which our whole sensibility, and with it also all possible appearances, have to the original unity of apperception....”[817]
Now also it is emphasised that save in and through a priori concepts no representations can exist for consciousness.
“They would then belong to no experience, would be without an object, a blind play of representations, less even than a dream.”[818] They “would be to us the same as nothing.”[819]
The wording is still not altogether unambiguous, but the main point is made sufficiently clear.
These paragraphs are the earliest in which traces of a genuine phenomenalism can be detected. The transcendental object, one and the same for all our knowledge, is not referred to. ‘Objects’ (in the plural) is the term which is used wherever the context permits. The empirical object is thus made to intervene between the thing in itself and the subjective representations. But the distinction between empirical objects and subjective representations on the one hand, and between empirical objects and things in themselves on the other, is not yet drawn in any really clear and definite manner.
A similar phenomenalist tendency crops out in Kant’s distinction[820] between objective affinity and subjective association.
“The ground of the possibility of the association of the manifold, so far as it lies in the object, is named the affinity of the manifold.”
None the less Kant’s subjectivism finds one of its most decided expressions in A 114.