Leibniz’s conception of appearances as things in themselves confusedly apprehended is equally false, and for the same reasons.[571] Appearance and reality are related as distinct existences, each of which has its own intrinsic character and content. Through the former there can be no hope of penetrating to the latter. Appearance is subjective in matter as well as in form. For Leibniz our knowledge of appearances is a confused knowledge of things in themselves. Properly viewed, it is the apprehension, whether distinct or confused, of objects which are never things in themselves. Sense-knowledge, such as we obtain in the science of geometry, has often the highest degree of clearness. Conceptual apprehension is all too frequently characterised by obscurity and indistinctness. This criticism of Leibniz, as expounded in these two paragraphs, is thoroughly misleading if taken as an adequate statement of Kant’s view of the relations between sense and understanding, appearance and reality. These paragraphs are really a restatement of a passage in the _Dissertation_. “It will thus be seen that we express the nature of the sensuous very inappropriately when we assert that it is the _more confusedly_ known, and the nature of the intellectual when we describe it as the _distinctly_ known. For these are merely logical distinctions, and obviously have nothing to do with the given facts which underlie all logical comparison. The sensuous may be absolutely distinct, and the intellectual extremely confused. That is shown on the one hand in _geometry_, the prototype of sensuous knowledge, and on the other in _metaphysics_, the instrument of all intellectual enquiry. Every one knows how zealously metaphysics has striven to dispel the mists of confusion which cloud the minds of men at large and yet has not always attained the happy results of the former science. Nevertheless each of these kinds of knowledge preserves the mark of the stock from which it has sprung. The former, however distinct, is on account of its origin entitled sensuous, while the latter, however confused, remains intellectual--as _e.g._ the _moral_ concepts, which are known not by way of experience, but through the pure intellect itself. I fear, however, that Wolff by this distinction between the sensuous and the intellectual, which for him is merely logical, has checked, perhaps wholly (to the great detriment of philosophy), that noblest enterprise of antiquity, the investigation of _the nature of phenomena and noumena_, turning men’s minds from such enquiries to what are very frequently only logical subleties.”[572]