 Kant concludes that the mathematical method cannot be applied to achieve philosophical (and, in particular, metaphysical) results, for the primary reason that “geometers acquire their concepts by means of synthesis, whereas philosophers can only acquire their concepts by means of analysis—and that completely changes the method of thought” (2:289). Yet at this pre-critical stage, he also concludes that, even lacking synthetic definitions of its primary concepts, “metaphysics is as much capable of the certainty which is necessary to produce conviction as mathematics” (2:296). (Later, in the critical period, Kant will expand the notion of synthesis to describe not only the genesis and combination of mathematical concepts, but also the act of unifying manifold representations. He will also, of course, use the terms “synthetic” and “analytic” to distinguish two mutually exclusive ways in which the subject and predicate concepts relate to one another in distinct judgments of any kind, and he will emphasize an expanded sense of this distinction that encompasses a methodological contrast between two modes of argumentation, one synthetic or progressive and the other analytic or regressive. These various senses of the analytic/synthetic distinction will be addressed briefly, below.)