It may be objected that Kant has in the main text cited one essential difference between his position and that which is being ascribed to him. Extended objects, though mere representations, are yet due to, and conditioned by, things in themselves. They are illusory only in regard to their properties, not in regard to their existence. But this distinction is not really relevant. The criticism, as just stated, is directed only against Kant’s view of space. The fact that the spatial world is a grounded and necessary illusion is not strictly relevant to the matter in dispute. Kant has, indeed, elsewhere, himself admitted the justice of the criticism. In A 780 = B 808 he cites as a possible hypothesis, entirely in harmony with his main results, though not in any degree established by them, the view “that this life is an appearance only, that is, a sensuous representation of purely spiritual life, and that the whole sensible world is a mere image (_ein blosses Bild_) which hovers before our present mode of knowledge, and like a dream has in itself no objective reality.” Kant’s reply is thus really only verbal. He claims that illusion, if constant, has earned the right to be called appearance. He accepts the criticism, but restates it in his own terms. The underlying phenomenalism which colours the position in his own thoughts, and for which he has not been able to find any quite satisfactory formulation, is the sole possible justification, if any such exists, for his contention that the criticism does not apply. Such phenomenalism crops out in the sentence, already partially quoted: “If I assert that the quality of space and time, according to which, as a condition of their existence, I posit both external objects and my own soul, lies in my mode of intuition and not in these objects in themselves, I am not saying that only by illusion do bodies seem to exist outside me or my soul to be given in my self-consciousness.”[591] But, so far, I have simplified Kant’s argument by leaving out of account a third and entirely different view of illusion which is likewise formulated in the appended note. In the middle of the second sentence, and in the last sentence, illusion is defined as the attribution to the thing in itself of what belongs to it only in its relation to the senses. Illusion lies not in the object apprehended, but only in the _judgment_ which we pass upon it. It is due, not to sense, but to understanding.[592] Viewing illusion in this way, Kant is enabled to maintain that his critics are guilty of “an unpardonable and almost intentional misconception,”[593] since this is the very fallacy which he himself has been most concerned to attack. As he has constantly insisted, appearance is appearance just because it can never be a revelation of the thing in itself.