 Green has four main aims in the first book of the Prolegomena. (1) He wants to reject the empiricist view that knowledge can be analyzed into two separable components—the deliverances of the senses and the operations of the understanding—in which what is given by nature is real and the contributions of the understanding are not (PE §§9–10, 20, 70). By contrast, Green argues, even the simplest experience involves operations of the understanding and relations to other elements of a self-conscious mind. (2) The attack on empiricism is supposed to support the idealist claim that nature is the product of the understanding (PE §20). Green’s attack on empiricism is clearly indebted to Kant’s claims in the Critique of Pure Reason, especially Kant’s account of the synthetic unity of apperception in the Transcendental Analytic. But, in defending idealism, Green argues that Kant did not carry his idealist principles to their logical conclusion (PE §41); he rejects the Kantian dualism of appearances and things-in-themselves (PE §§11, 30–41). (3) In order for the idealist to distinguish between appearance and reality, it is necessary to posit an “eternal” and “unalterable” system of relations in a self-conscious corporate agent that includes the finite systems of relations contained in the self-conscious minds of individual persons (PE §§13, 26, 69). (4) Though much of the first book of the Prolegomena is concerned with the role of self-consciousness in apparently discrete episodes of experience, Green is also concerned with the role of self-consciousness in knowledge. Knowledge requires more than acting on appearances; it involves assenting to true appearances for good reasons. This requires the ability to distance oneself from appearances and to assess the evidence for appearances, especially their congruence with other elements of consciousness. This sort of epistemic responsibility requires self-consciousness.