[8] Cf. p. 93 and ff. This objection is, of course, reasonable. No one can satisfy himself of the justice of the above criticisms until he has considered the real nature of the distinction between appearance and reality. This distinction must, therefore, be analysed. But before this is done it is necessary, in order to discover the real issue, to formulate the lines on which Kant may be defended. 'The reality,' it may be urged, 'which ideally we wish to know must be admitted to exist _in itself_, in the sense of independently of the perception, and consequently its nature must be admitted to be independent of perception. Ideally, then, our desire is to know things[9] as they are in themselves, a desire sufficiently expressed by the assertion that we desire to know things, for to know them is to know them as they are, i. e. as they are independently of perception. Again, since the reality which we desire to know consists of individuals, and since the apprehension of an individual implies perception, knowledge of reality requires perception. If in perception we apprehended reality as it is, no difficulty would arise. But we do not, for we are compelled to distinguish what things are, and what they look or appear; and what they appear essentially relates to perception. We perceive them as they look or appear and, therefore, not as they are, for what they look and what they are are _ex hypothesi_ distinguished. And this fact constitutes a fatal obstacle to knowledge in general. We cannot know anything as it _is_. At least the negative side of Kant's position must be justified. We never can know things as they are in themselves. What then do we know? Two alternative answers may be given. It may be held that the positive side of Kant's position, though indefensible in the form that we know things as they appear to us, is valid in the form that we know what things look or appear. This, no doubt, implies that our ordinary beliefs about reality are illusory, for what things look is _ex hypothesi_ different from what they are. But the implication does not constitute an important departure from Kant's view. For in any case only that is knowledge proper which relates to things as they are, and therefore the supposed knowledge of things as they appear may be discarded without serious loss. On the other hand, it may be held that the positive side of Kant's position can be vindicated in the form that, while we do not know things in themselves,[10] we do know the appearances which they produce in us. It is true that this view involves the difficulty of maintaining that appearances are spatial, but the difficulty is not insuperable. Moreover, in this form the doctrine has the advantage that, unlike the former, it does not imply that the knowledge which we have is only of illusions, for instead of implying that our knowledge is merely knowledge of what things look but really are not, it implies that we