“They have their object, but an object which can never be intuited by us, and which may therefore be named the non-empirical, _i.e._ transcendental object = _x_.”[757] This object is conceived as being that which prevents our representations from occurring at haphazard, necessitating their order in such manner that, manifold and varied as they may be, they can yet be self-consistent in their several groupings, and so possess that unity which is essential to the concept of an object. “The pure concept of this transcendental object, which in fact throughout all our knowledge is always one and the same, is that which can alone confer upon all our empirical concepts relation in general to an object, _i.e._ objective reality.”[758] What renders this doctrine impossible of permanent retention was that it allowed of no objective existence mediate between the merely subjective and the thing in itself. On such teaching there is no room for the empirical object; and immediately upon the recognition of that latter phenomenal form of existence in space, Kant was constrained to recognise that it is in the empirical object, not in the thing in itself, that the contents of our representations are grounded and unified. Any other view must involve the application of the categories, especially those of substance and causality, to the thing in itself. The entire empirical world has still to be conceived as grounded in the non-empirical, but that is a very different contention from the thesis that the thing in itself is the object and the sole object of our representations. The doctrine of the transcendental object has thus a twofold defect: it advocates an extreme subjectivism, and yet at the same time applies the categories to the thing in itself. But the latter consequence is one which could not, at the stage represented by this section, be appreciated by Kant. For, as we shall find, he is endeavouring to solve the problem of the reference of sense-representation to an object without assumption of _a priori_ categories. It is in _empirical_ concepts, conditioned only by a transcendental apperception, that he professes to discover the grounds and conditions of this objective reference. Let us follow Kant’s argument in detail. The section opens[759] with what may be a reference to the _Aesthetic_, and proceeds to deal with the first of the two problems cited in the 1772 letter to Herz[760]--how _sense_-representations stand related to their object. The exact terms in which this question was there formulated should be noted.