all combination, whether we are conscious of it or not, whether it is a combination of the manifold of intuition or of several concepts, and in the first case either of sensible or non sensible intuition, is an action of the understanding, which we would designate with the general title synthesis in order at the same time to draw attention to the fact that we can represent nothing as combined in the objectC without having previously combined it ourselves, and that among all representations combination is the only one that is not given through objectsd but can be executed only by the subject itself, since it is an acte of its self activity.