the transcendental meaning thereof, the house is not a thing in itself, but only a phenomenon, i. e. a representation, the transcendental object of which is unknown. What, then, am I to understand by the question, 'How may the manifold be connected in the phenomenon itself (which is nevertheless nothing in itself)?' Here that which lies in the successive apprehension is regarded as representation, while the phenomenon which is given me, although it is nothing more than a complex of these representations, is regarded as the object thereof, with which my conception, drawn from the representations of apprehension, is to agree. It is soon seen that, since agreement of knowledge with the object is truth, we can ask here only for the formal conditions of empirical truth, and that the phenomenon, in opposition to the representations of apprehension, can only be represented as the object of the same, distinct therefrom, if it stands under a rule, which distinguishes it from every other apprehension, and which renders necessary a mode of conjunction of the manifold. That in the phenomenon which contains the condition of this necessary rule of apprehension is the object."[24] [24] B. 234-6, M. 143-4. Cf. B. 242, M. 147. This passage is only intelligible if we realize the _impasse_ into which Kant has been led by his doctrine that objects, i. e. realities in the physical world, are only representations or ideas. As has already been pointed out,[25] an apprehension is essentially inseparable from a reality of which it is the apprehension. In other words, an apprehension is always the apprehension of a reality, and a reality apprehended, i. e. an object of apprehension, cannot be stated in terms of the apprehension of it. We never confuse an apprehension and its object; nor do we take the temporal relations which belong to the one for the temporal relations which belong to the other, for these relations involve different terms which are never confused, viz. apprehensions and the objects apprehended. Now Kant, by his doctrine of the unknowability of the thing in itself, has really deprived himself of an object of apprehension or, in his language, of an object of representations. For it is the thing in itself which is, properly speaking, the object of the representations of which he is thinking, i. e. representations of a reality in nature; and yet the thing in itself, being on his view inapprehensible, can never be for him an object in the proper sense, i. e. a reality apprehended. Hence he is only able to state the fact of knowledge in terms of mere apprehensions, or ideas, or representations--the particular name is a matter of indifference--and consequently his efforts to recover an object of apprehension are fruitless. As a matter of fact, these efforts only result in the assertion that the object of representations consists in the representations themselves related in a certain necessary way. But this view is open to two fatal objections.