 Thus far, this discussion of the Fundamental Ideas may suggest that they are similar to Kant’s forms of intuition, and indeed there are some similarities. Because of this, some commentators have argued that Whewell’s epistemology is a type of Kantianism (see, for example, Butts 1973; Buchdahl 1991). However, this interpretation ignores several crucial differences between the two views. Whewell did not follow Kant in drawing a distinction between “precepts,” or forms of intuition, such as Space and Time, and the categories, or forms of thought, in which Kant included the concepts of Cause and Substance. Moreover, Whewell included as Fundamental Ideas many ideas which function not as conditions of experience but as conditions for having knowledge within their respective sciences: although it is certainly possible to have experience of the world without having a distinct idea of, say, Chemical Affinity, we could not have any knowledge of certain chemical processes without it. Unlike Kant, Whewell did not attempt to give an exhaustive list of these Fundamental Ideas; indeed, he believed that there are others which will emerge in the course of the development of science. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly for his philosophy of science, Whewell rejected Kant’s claim that we can only have knowledge of our “categorized experience.” The Fundamental Ideas, on Whewell’s view, accurately represent objective features of the world, independent of the processes of the mind, and we can use these Ideas in order to have knowledge of these objective features. Indeed, Whewell criticized Kant for viewing external reality as a “dim and unknown region” (see 1860a, 312). Further, Whewell’s justification for the presence of these concepts in our minds takes a very different form than Kant’s transcendental argument. For Kant, the categories are justified because they make experience possible. For Whewell, though the categories do make experience (of certain kinds) possible, the Ideas are justified by their origin in the mind of a divine creator (see especially his discussion of this in his 1860a). And finally, the type of necessity which Whewell claimed is derived from the Ideas is very different from Kant’s notion of the synthetic a priori (For a nuanced view of the relation between the views of Kant and Whewell, see Ducheyne 2011.) I return to these last two points in the section on Necessary Truth below.