And by 'existence outside us' the world probably means--for it is imprudent to define and refine too much in this hazy medium of words where we all drowse--existence of things on an independent footing beyond the limits of our personal, i. e. bodily and sentient, self. As regards _our own_ trunk and limbs, most of us, except in some most strange insanity, are not likely ever to be in doubt, and are indeed more likely, after Schopenhauer's model, to take the knowledge of these _personalia_ as the one thing immediately and intuitively certain. We talk freely enough, it is true, about existence outside our own minds; but it is only a drastic method of stating the difference between a fancy and a fact. And probably we labour under a half-unconscious hallucination that our minds are localised in some material 'seat,' somewhere in our bodily limits, and more especially in the central nerve-organs. But, as has been said elsewhere[2], the point of view under which Mind is regarded by Kant is that of Consciousness, and especially perceptive consciousness. He describes, as we have put it above, the steps or conditions under which the single sense-observation is elevated into the rank of an experience claiming universality and necessity. But the whole machinery of consciousness--the form of sensibility and the category of intellect--is originally set in motion by an impetus from without: or at least the manipulating machinery requires a raw material on which to operate. Consciousness, or the observer who takes this point of view, feels that it is being played upon by an unknown performer--or that it is attempting to apprehend something, which, because the act of apprehension is also to some extent (and to what extent, who can say?) a transmutation, it must for ever fail to apprehend truly. It is haunted by the phantom of a real,--a thing in its own right, which can only appear in forms of sense and intellect, never in its own essential being. It is only a short step further--and Kant, if one may judge him by several isolated passages, has more than once crossed the interval,--to treat, after the manner of uneducated consciousness and of popular science, the thing in its independent being as the cause which produces the sensation, or as the original which the mental idea reproduces under the distortions or modifications rendered necessary by the sensuous-intellectual medium. For, if under the terms of one analogy the perception is an _effect_ of the thing, under those of another it is an _image_ or copy of external reality.