=The Threefold World[55] of Kant――Subjective States, Things-in-Themselves, and Phenomena.= In his search for those indispensable conditions of knowledge of the external world, Kant unfolds the threefold character of the realm of human life. To Wolff the world had been twofold. In other words, Wolff had conceived the world as dual, in which there was a correspondence, part by part, of independent reality to the states of consciousness. To Wolff reality is independent of consciousness, and yet we are conscious of that reality. Now Kant never gave up entirely the Wolffian dualism, but he came to see that in such a situation there could be no knowledge. For how can we be conscious of what is absolutely independent of us? Consequently Kant plundered the Wolffian worlds of independent realities to build up an intermediate world,――a world of phenomena. He dissolved the sharpness of Wolff’s dualism into a world with three divisions; and he gave to each division a new epistemological value. These were the realm of the subjective states or the inner consciousness of the individual, the world of phenomena or the realm of knowledge, and the world of absolute reality or that of things-in-themselves. The value of the world of phenomena consists in its being the realm of knowledge. The other two realms have values of their own, which we shall describe below. Wolff’s twofold world may be thus compared with Kant’s threefold world:―― Wolff. Kant. 1. Mind. 1. Subjective states. 2. Phenomena――the realm of knowledge. 2. Matter. 3. Things-in-themselves. 1. The realm of subjective states evidently is not a realm of knowledge. For it is the realm of intuition and immediate apprehension of the individual’s own ideas and sensations; and this is not what we mean by knowledge. This subjective world is that in which I live alone. It is a realm of which nobody else is conscious, a realm which gives to me my individuality. The only connecting linkage between my various purely subjective states is the accidental order of time in which, empirically or by association, they occur. Animal intelligence possesses only such sense-perceptions and sensations, and these are modifications of its subjective consciousness. Such a mental constitution has not the capacity for knowledge, but only the haphazard association of ideas. Kant looked upon the content of subjective consciousness as the object only of psychological investigation.