heir manifold how this manifold is connected in the object. For
after all we have to do only with our representations; how things may
be in themselves, without regard to the representations through which
they affect us, is wholly outside the sphere of our knowledge. Now,
although phenomena are not things in themselves, and are nevertheless
the only thing which can be given to us as data for knowledge, it is
my business to show what kind of connexion in time belongs to the
manifold in phenomena themselves, while the representation of this
manifold in apprehension is always successive. Thus, for example, the
apprehension of the manifold in the phenomenon of a house which stands
before me is successive. Now arises the question, whether the manifold
of this house itself is in itself also successive, which of course no
one will grant. But, so soon as I raise my conceptions of an object to
the transcendental meaning thereof, the house is not a thing in
itself, but only a phenomenon, i. e. a representation, the
transcendental object of which is unknown. What, then, am I to
understand by the question, 'How may the manifold be connected in the
phenomenon itself (which is nevertheless nothing in itself)?' Here
that which lies in the successive apprehension is regarded as
representation, while the phenomenon which is given me, although it
is nothing more than a complex of these representations, is regarded
as the object thereof, with which my conception, drawn from the
representations of apprehension, is to agree. It is soon seen that,
since agreement of knowledge with the object is truth, we can ask here
only for the formal conditions of empirical truth, and that the
phenomenon, in opposition to the representations of apprehension, can
only be represented as the object of the same, distinct therefrom, if
it stands under a rule, which distinguishes it from every other
apprehension, and which renders necessary a mode of conjunction of the
manifold. That in the phenomenon which contains the condition of this
necessary rule of apprehension is the object."[24]

[24] B. 234-6, M. 143-4. Cf. B. 242, M. 147.

This passage is only intelligible if we realize the _impasse_ into
which Kant has been led by his doctrine that objects, i. e. realities
in the physical world, are only representations or ideas. As has
already been pointed out,[25] an apprehension is essentially
inseparable from a reality of which it is the apprehension. In oth