Kant’s views on time and its role in human cognition are one of the most perplexing, yet suggestive, aspects of his philosophy. I argue that the particulars of Kant’s account can only be properly understood by first recognizing the fundamental connection – unappreciated until now – that he sees between time and human cognition. In particular, because human cognition does not create the world that it knows, it presupposes sensible affection by a pre-existing object, and as such necessarily involves a transition between opposing sensory states, which can only occur, I argue, over a structure with time’s properties (namely a dense, ordered, relational structure). Using this insight, I generate a unified set of answers to three long-standing puzzles regarding Kant’s account of time’s role in human cognition, and show that far from being a haphazard collection of idiosyncratic doctrines, Kant’s account is the systematic unfolding of a single core thought regarding the connection between time and any mode of cognition that does not create its object.