  Vaihinger, by contrast, does not hesitate to admit that the above objections are genuine problems for Kant. Indeed, he believes they pinpoint serious inconsistencies in Kant’s position. For example, against Cohen’s deflationary treatment of the thing in itself, Vaihinger notes, “Kant speaks thousands of times of affecting things in themselves; the impossibility of the existence and causal efficacy of things in themselves is, by contrast, merely a consequence that Kant’s readers must certainly draw from his theory of the categories, but which Kant himself hints at only seldom, and even then only timidly” (1881–92, 2:47) (the actual target of this remark is Fichte, but the point applies to Cohen’s reading too). Vaihinger’s goal in the Commentary is not to exonerate Kant from such inconsistencies, but to explain why he fell into them. In particular, Vaihinger argues that careful attention to both Kant’s pre-critical writings and his unpublished notes reveals that the Critique is really a “patchwork” of inconsistent views and arguments from various periods of Kant’s intellectual development. It consists of “geological strata which differ in both time of composition and content” (1902, 27). In the case of the Deduction, Vaihinger even claims to have been able to trace precisely each portion of the text to a particular series of notes from the decade between the Dissertation and the KrV (1902). In this respect, then, Kant’s great book resembles more the texts of Homer than the work of a single author, writing at a single time, with a single set of views.