It is not only the Ideas of
pure Reason, as Kant styled them, that have this power of making us vitally feel presences that we are impotent articulately to
describe.
In the first edition of his Critique of
Pure Reason, Kant stresses the indispensability of this faculty in the synthesis of the sensible and the intellectual — a faculty he
describes as «a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever» (CPR 112).