 Kant distinguishes between two basic classes of mental processing. The first is association, which is carried out by sensibility, and specifically the imagination. Association is primarily a passive process by which the mind comes to connect representations due to the repeated exposure of the subject to certain kinds of regularities. One might (e.g.) associate chicken soup with being ill, because one only ever had chicken soup when one was ill. Association is thus capable of engendering content-sensitive connections between a subject’s mental states, though such connections depend entirely on the local and contingent circumstances in which the subject comes to have such states. This is part of why Kant denies that association could ever account for our ability to represent universality or necessity.