Note 862 — Chapter II · DEDUCTION OF THE PURE CONCEPTS OF THE UNDERSTANDING

In B 160 Kant states that the synthesis of apprehension is only empirical; and in B 152 we find the following emphatic sentence: “In so far as the faculty of imagination is spontaneously active I sometimes also name it [i.e. in addition to entitling it transcendental and figurative] productive, and thereby distinguish it from the reproductive imagination whose synthesis is subject only to empirical laws, i.e. those of association, and which therefore contributes nothing in explanation of the possibility of a priori knowledge. Hence it belongs, not to transcendental philosophy, but to psychology.” Cf. the directly counter statement in A 102: “The reproductive synthesis of the faculty of imagination must be counted among the transcendental actions of the mind.”