But it is a fact, and one that has got to be explained that in judgment we go beyond what is present to our minds, and that, in so anticipating what we shall experience, we assume that certain principles hold of all that has been or may be present. With that difficulty idealism, as ordinarily understood, has nothing to do. Representationism tried to give some account of this going beyond what is present to our minds by suggesting that truth is a reference from ideas to reality; but, as we saw, if we know only ideas, such a reference is impossible. The doctrines opposed to representationism, that only ideas exist, or that we directly know real objects, allow the existence of nothing contrasted with what we are apprehending to which a reference in judgment can be made. No one who is satisfied with any of these positions can have seen Kant’s problem. If Kant then, is not a subjective idealist what does he mean by saying, as he constantly does, that we only know phenomena, and why should that limitation of knowledge help him in any of his difficulties? He means, in the first place, that all knowledge depends upon perception. The first paragraph of the first part of the _Critique of Pure Reason_ makes that clear. "Whatever the process and the means may be by which knowledge reaches its objects, there is one that reaches them directly and forms the ultimate material of all thought, viz. perception. This is possible only when the object is given, and the object can be given only (to human beings, at least) through a certain affection of the mind."