APPREHENSION

[A121] In the Deduction in A, Kant asserts that the imagination acts to synthesize perceptions (i.e., in the manifold of intuitions), and he alls this action of synthesis apprehension. "Since imagination has to bring the manifold of intuition into the form of an image, it must previously have taken the impressions [i.e., the perceptions] up into its activity, that is, have apprehended them". This apprehensions has affinity, and thus "fits into a connected whole of human knowledge". [A177/B219] The synthesis of apprehension is the first ordering of intuitions in a manifold, and in this synthesis they are not ordered by the categories in the ways prescribed in the Analogies: "In experience...perceptions come together only in accidental order, so that no necessity determining their connection is or can be revealed by the perceptions themselves. For apprehension is only a placing together of the manifold of empirical intuition; and we can find in it no representation of any necessity which determines the appearances thus combined to have connected existence in time and space". It is an important Kantian thesis that apprehension is always successive.