nd time, vanished when I turned my head away, it could not, unless
intuited by a subject, experience or exert effects in space and time, could
not lose its leaves in the wind and strew the ground with its petals.
Perception and thought inform me not merely concerning events of which I am
a witness, but also of others which have occurred, or which will occur, in
my absence. The process of stripping the leaves from the rose has actually
taken place as a phenomenon and does not first become real by my subsequent
representation of it or inference to it. The things and events of the
phenomenal world exist both before and after my perception, and are
something distinct from my subjective and momentary representations of
them. The space and time, however, in which they exist and happen are
not furnished by the intuiting individual, but by the supra-individual,
_transcendental consciousness_ or generic reason of the race. The
phenomenon thus stands midway between its objective ground (the absolute
thing in itself) and the subject, whose common product it is, as a relative
thing in itself, as a reality which is independent of the contingent and
changing representation of the individual, empirical subject, which is
dependent for its form on the transcendental subject, and which is the only
reality accessible to us, yet entirely valid for us. The phenomenal world
is not a contingent and individual phenomenon, but one necessary for all
beings organized as we are, a phenomenon for humanity. My representations
are not the phenomena themselves, but images and signs through which I
cognize phenomena, _i.e._, real things as they are for me and for every man
(not as they are in themselves). The reality of phenomena consists in the
fact that they can be perceived by men, and the objective validity of my
knowledge of them in the fact that every man must agree in it. The laws
which the understanding (not the individual understanding!) imposes upon
nature hold for phenomena, because they hold for every man. Objectivity is
universal validity. If the world of phenomena which is intuited and known
by us wears a different appearance from the world of things in themselves,
this does not justify us in declaring it to be mere seeming and dreaming; a
dream which all dream together, and which all must dream, is not a dream,
but reality. As we must represent the world> so it is, though for us, of
course, and not in itself.

Many places in Kant's works s