“The non-sensuous cause of our representations is completely unknown to us, and therefore we cannot intuit it as object.... We may, however, entitle the purely intelligible cause of appearances in general the transcendental object.... To this transcendental object we can ascribe the whole extent and connection of our possible perceptions....”[797] Appearances can be regarded as real only to the extent to which they are actually experienced. Otherwise they exist only in some unknown noumenal form of which we can acquire no definite concept, and which is therefore really nothing to us. This, Kant declares, is true even of that immemorial past of which we are ourselves the product. “...all the events which have taken place in the immense periods that have preceded my own existence mean really nothing but the possibility of extending the chain of experience from the present perception back to the conditions which determine it in time.”[798] In other words, we may not claim that such events, empirically conceived, have ever actually existed in any such empirical form. A similar interpretation is given to the assertion of the present reality of what has never been actually experienced. “Moreover, in outcome it is a matter of indifference whether I say that in the empirical progress in space I can meet with stars a hundred times farther removed than the outermost now perceptible to me, or whether I say that they are perhaps to be met with in cosmical space even though no human being has ever perceived or ever will perceive them. For though they might be given as things in themselves, without relation to possible experience, they are still nothing for me, and therefore are not objects, save in so far as they are contained in the series of the empirical regress.”[799] “The cause of the empirical conditions of this process, that which determines what members I shall meet with and how far by means of such members I can carry out the regress, is transcendental and is therefore necessarily unknown to me.”[800]