Wouldn't Locke's sensualism, Berkeley's idealism, and so much more that is tied up with these philosophies have been impossible if they had distinguished adequately between thinking in the narrow [objective] sense and representing; between the constituents (concepts, objects, relations) and the representations? Even if human thinking does not take place without representations, the content of a judgment is something objective, the same for all. … What we are saying for the whole content is true also of its constituents that we can distinguish within it.

The erroneous belief that a thought (a judgment, as it is usually called) is something psychological like a representation. … leads necessarily to epistemological idealism.

Through the present example … we see how pure thought, irrespective of the content given by the senses or even by an a priori intuition, can bring forth judgments deriving solely from the content that springs from its own constitution, which at first sight appear to be possible only on the basis of some intuition. One can compare this with condensation, through which it is possible to transform the air that to a child's consciousness appears as nothing into an invisible fluid in the shape of drops.