 Although the details of Maimon’s answer to this problem remain obscure, the kernel of his position can be found in his analysis of what it is to be a finite cognizer. While Kant moves from the fact of our human finitude to the need for a ‘given’ element of cognition, Maimon claims that such a step need not be taken. Instead of characterizing finitude in terms of the need for a passive faculty of receptivity, Maimon insists that finitude only implies incompleteness in our cognition — but this incompleteness does not warrant any conclusions about the provenance of the matter of cognition. The content of sensibility is simply that which is passive in cognition — namely, that upon which the understanding operates. The expression that content is given from ‘outside of us,’ Maimon writes, means only “something in a representation of which we are conscious of no spontaneity, that is, (in view of our consciousness) a mere passivity without activity.” And, he continues, the word ‘given’ signifies not “something in us that has its cause outside of us … rather, [the given] means merely a representation, whose manner of origin in us is unknown to us.” (GW II, 203 | VT 203) What we take to be merely given to us in experience can in fact be explained in terms of a productive — and hence active — capacity of the mind, although the procedures of this activity remain unknown to us.