[12] The drift of the passage would seem to be this: 'If we are to present to ourselves an instance of a quantity, we must successively combine similar units until they form a quantity. This process involves the thought of a successive process by which we add units according to the conception of a quantity. This thought is the thought of number, and since by it we present to ourselves an instance of a quantity, it is the schema of quantity.' But if this be its drift, considerations of sense demand that it should be rewritten, at least to the following extent: 'If we are to present to ourselves an instance of a _particular_ quantity [which will really be a particular number, for it must be regarded as discrete, (cf. B. 212, M. 128 fin., 129 init.)] e. g. three, we must successively combine units until they form _that_ quantity. This process involves the thought of a successive process, by which we add units according to the conception of _that_ quantity. This thought is the thought of a particular number, and since by it we present to ourselves an instance of _that_ quantity, this thought is the schema of _that_ quantity.' If this rewriting be admitted to be necessary, it must be allowed that Kant has confused (_a_) the thoughts of particular quantities and of particular numbers with those of quantity and of number in general respectively, (_b_) the thought of a particular quantity with that of a particular number (for the process referred to presupposes that the particular quantity taken is known to consist of a number of equal units) and (_c_) the thought of counting with that of number.
[13] This statement is, of course, not meant as a definition of counting, but as a means of bringing out the distinction between a process of counting and a number.
[14] For the thought of a number is the thought of a quantity of a special kind, viz. of a quantity made up of a number of similar units without remainder.
The account of the schema of reality, the second category, runs as follows: "Reality is in the pure conception of the understanding that which corresponds to a sensation in general, that therefore of which the conception in itself indicates a being (in time), while negation is that of which the conception indicates a not being (in time). Their opposition, therefore, arises in the distinction between one and the same time as filled or empty. Since time is only the form of perception, consequently of objects as phenomena, that which in objects corresponds to sensation is the transcendental matter of all objects as things in themselves (thinghood, reality).[15] Now every sensation has a degree or magnitude by which it can fill the same time, i. e. the internal sense, in respect of the same representation of an object, more or less, until it vanishes into nothing ( = 0 = _negatio_). There is, therefore, a relation and connexion between reality and negation, or rather a transition from the former to the latter, which makes every reality representable as a _quantum_; and the schema of a reality, as the quantity of something so far as it fills time, is just this continuous and uniform generation of the reality in time, as we descend in time from the sensation which has a certain degree, down to the vanishing thereof, or gradually ascend from negation to the magnitude thereof."[16]