Let us here point out a distinction between the thing in itself and noumenon. Noumenon means “a thing of thought.” The noumenal world is the world of thoughts in a thinking being’s mind. The noumenon must not be identified with the thing in itself. The two terms are often confounded, but they have to be distinguished. The idea of reflected ether-vibrations is a “noumenon,” but the reflected ether-vibrations themselves, the objective process are a thing, i. e. an objective reality, and in so far as they are a reality, considered as being independent of sensation, we may call them “a thing in itself.” Now when Kant denies the objectivity of time and space, he must, implicitly, also deny the objective validity of a description made in terms of measuring and counting. The pictorial world of our sense-perception is subjective, it is built up of sensations, it is not objective; and the world of thought is the attempt to reduce the subjective world of sense-imagery to terms of objective validity, i. e. to terms of form. But this world of thought is according to Kant purely mental, it is purely noumenal, or, in other words, noumena do not represent things independent of cognition, they represent things as our mind thinks them. The sensory world is mere appearance, it is a subjective phenomenon, but the world of thought, says Kant, is no less subjective, it is a world of thought which describes things in terms of purely mental properties and not in properties of the things themselves. This is tantamount to the proposition, that things in themselves cannot be known. The term “thing in itself,” in the sense of a thing as it is independent of sensibility, would better be called “the objective thing,” and we shall so call it when we wish to distinguish it from Kant’s thing in itself. The objective thing is the thing, not expressed in terms of subjective elements, such as feelings or sensibility, but in terms of objective elements, i. e. in terms of form. That a description of things in terms of forms is possible has never been denied either by Kant or by any Kantian; but they deny that these descriptions are anything more than mere noumena; Kant and the orthodox Kantians deny that they represent the things as they are in themselves. Thus the term thing in itself in the Kantian sense comes to mean the thing as it is independent of space and time.