Kant, so learned that he was said to "know everything," was completely acquainted with the whole trend of British philosophy, from John Locke to David Hume. He was saturated, too, with the physical sciences. So his first real step in his _Critique of Pure Reason_ was to found himself on the all-inclusive law of scientific idealism. Immanuel Kant did not fool with this law. He did not test it, prove it, and then let it slip out of a loose, greasy mind, as an airy nothing of no practical consequence. He grasped it, and held it, as the bed-rock of all thought and all things. It is a pity he omitted to say so at the very first touch of his work. But he said it clearly enough when he happened to get ready. Thus, for instance:[57] "In order to prevent any misunderstanding, it will be requisite, in the first place, to recapitulate, as clearly as possible, what our opinion is with respect to _the fundamental nature of our sensuous cognition in general_. We have intended, then, to say that all our intuition is nothing but the re-presentation of phenomena; that the things which we intuite are not in themselves the same as our re-presentations of them in intuition, nor are their relations so constituted as they appear to us; and that _if we take away the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of our senses in general_, then _not only the nature and relations of objects_ in space and time, _but even space and time themselves disappear_.... What may be the nature of objects considered as things in themselves, and without reference to the receptivity of our sensibility, is quite unknown to us." Again, in closing his dissection of space, Kant said: "Objects are quite unknown to us in themselves, and _what we call outward objects_ are nothing else but mere _re-presentations of our sensibility_, whose form is space, but whose real correlate, the thing in itself, is not known by means of these representations, nor ever can be, but respecting which, in experience, no inquiry is ever made." Once more: "The faculty of sensibility not only does not present us with any indistinct and confused cognition of objects as things in themselves, but, in fact, gives us _no knowledge of these_ at all. On the contrary, as soon as we abstract in thought _our own subjective nature_, the object re-presented, with the properties ascribed to it by sensuous intuition, _entirely disappears, because it was only this subjective nature that determined the form of the object as a phenomenon_." After awhile, under the maddening caption of "The Possibility of a Conjunction of the Manifold Representations given by Sense,"[58] our German professor virtually crowded his whole work into this one paragraph: