Kant only renders his own view plausible by treating an apprehension or representation as if it consisted in a sensation or an appearance. A sensation or an appearance, so far from being the apprehension of anything, is in fact a reality which can be apprehended, of the kind called mental. Hence it can be treated as an object, i. e. something apprehended or presented, though not really as an object in nature. On the other hand, from the point of view of the thing in itself it can be treated as only an apprehension, even though it is an unsuccessful apprehension. Thus, for Kant, there is something which can with some plausibility be treated as an object as well as an apprehension, and therefore as capable of standing in both a subjective and an objective relation to other realities of the same kind.[29] [29] Cf. pp. 137 and 231. If we now turn to the passage under discussion, we find it easy to vindicate the justice of the criticism that Kant, inconsistently with the distinction which he desires to elucidate, treats the same thing as at once the representation of an object and the object represented. He is trying to give such an account of 'object of representations' as will explain what is meant by a succession in an object in nature, i. e. a phenomenon, in distinction from the succession in our apprehension of it. In order to state this distinction at all, he has to speak of what enters into the two successions as different. "It is my business to show what sort of connexion in time belongs to the _manifold_ in phenomena themselves, while the _representation_ of this manifold in apprehension is always successive."[30] Here an element of the manifold is distinguished from the representation of it. Yet Kant, though he thus distinguishes them, repeatedly identifies them; in other words, he identifies a representation with that of which it is a representation, viz. an element in or part of the object itself. "_Our apprehension_ of the manifold of the phenomenon is always successive. _The representations_ of the parts succeed one another. Whether _they_ [i. e. _the representations_[31]] succeed one another _in the object_ also, is a second point for reflection.... So far as they [i. e. phenomena], as representations only, are at the same time objects of consciousness, they are not to be distinguished from apprehension, i. e. reception into the synthesis of imagination, and we must therefore say, _'The manifold of phenomena_ is always produced successively in the mind'. If phenomena were things in themselves, no man would be able to infer from the succession of the representations how _this manifold_ is connected _in the object_.... 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_ representation and which renders necessary a mode of conjunction of the manifold."[32]