Kant’s conception of knowledge, then, is something like this. Each of us is in direct contact with reality, but we perceive directly only a small part of it, and, as our consciousness moves on in time, and as we change our position in space, we are directly conscious of different small portions of reality. A part of the whole is illumined by direct perception, but the whole stretches beyond that indefinitely in space and time. In the part we directly perceive there is a temporal order and a spatial order. Things are given to us arranged in space and ordered in time, and these arrangements or orders in the space and time that is directly given to us in perception have certain rules, and we think of these principles of arrangement as extending indefinitely beyond the space and time given to us in perception. When we make judgments about reality beyond our perception, we think of things as so arranged in the space and time beyond our perception as we should see them arranged were the range of our perception sufficiently wide. Further, it is most important to remember that we do not remain in one place and at one time and make guesses of what may happen in the darkness beyond. Though our perception at any one moment is limited, we can connect what we see at one time with what we see at another. We can, by means of language and writing, use the perception of others to fill out our experience, until gradually our scientific judgments, our knowledge of what we should perceive under all sorts of possible experience, seems to bulk much more largely than could our individual perceptions. But we are still, Kant would say, getting at our knowledge of what is beyond by piecing together what we and other people have perceived, and the whole is always much more than that. What, then, is meant by the contention that we can know things in themselves which Kant is earnest to refute? It might mean that we do in perception attain to a complete knowledge, but that would be obviously untrue. As Kant understood the claim, it meant rather something like this: In thought we are obviously not limited by our perception. We are always assuming certain principles, such as the laws of space or the principle of causation, to hold of all reality, both what we do and what we do not directly perceive. May we not say, then, that these principles hold of all reality, and argue from that fact to what the nature of the whole must be? If everything that we know is caused, _e.g._, may we not apply the principle of causation to all reality and say that it must have a cause?