[22] I can attach no meaning to Mr. Bertrand Russell's assertion that relations have no instances. See _The Principles of Mathematics_, § 55.
Kant has failed to notice this confusion for two reasons. In the first place, beginning in the _Analytic_ with the thought that the thing in itself, by acting on our sensibility, produces isolated sense data, he is led to adopt a different view of the understanding from that which he originally gave, and to conceive its business as consisting in relating these data. In the second place, by distinguishing the imagination from the understanding, he is able to confine the understanding to being the source of universals or principles of relation in distinction from individual relations.[23] Since, however, as has been pointed out, and as Kant himself sees at times, the imagination is the understanding working unreflectively, this limitation cannot be successful.
There remain for consideration the difficulties of the second kind, i. e. the difficulties involved in accepting its main principles at all. These are of course the most important. Throughout the deduction Kant is attempting to formulate the nature of knowledge. According to him, it consists in an activity of the mind by which it combines the manifold of sense on certain principles and is to some extent aware that it does so, and by which it thereby gives the manifold relation to an object. Now the fundamental and final objection to this account is that what it describes is not knowledge at all. The justice of this objection may be seen by considering the two leading thoughts underlying the view, which, though closely connected, may be treated separately. These are the thought of knowledge as a process by which representations acquire relation to an object, and the thought of knowledge as a process of synthesis.
It is in reality meaningless to speak of 'a process by which representations or ideas acquire relation to an object'.[24] The phrase must mean a process by which a mere apprehension, which, as such, is not the apprehension of an object, becomes the apprehension of an object. Apprehension, however, is essentially and from the very beginning the apprehension of an object, i. e. of a reality apprehended. If there is no object which the apprehension is 'of', there is no apprehension. It is therefore wholly meaningless to speak of a process by which an apprehension _becomes_ the apprehension of an object. If when we reflected we were not aware of an object, i. e. a reality apprehended, we could not be aware of our apprehension; for our apprehension is the apprehension of it, and is itself only apprehended in relation to, though in distinction from, it. It is therefore impossible to suppose a condition of mind in which, knowing what 'apprehension' means, we proceed to ask, 'What is meant by an object of it?' and 'How does an apprehension become related to an object?'; for both questions involve the thought of a mere representation, i. e. of an apprehension which as yet is not the apprehension of anything.