From this, then, it also follows that the objective world, as we know it, does not belong to the true being of the thing in itself, but is merely its phenomenal appearance conditioned by those very forms which lie _a priori_ in the intellect (_i.e._, the brain), therefore it cannot contain anything but phenomena. Kant, indeed, did not attain to the knowledge that the phenomenon is the world as idea, and the thing in itself is the will. But he showed that the phenomenal world is conditioned just as much through the subject as through the object, and because he isolated the most universal forms of its phenomenal appearance, _i.e._, of the idea, he proved that we may know these forms and consider them in their whole constitution, not only by starting from the object, but also just as well by starting from the subject, because they are really the limits between object and subject which are common to them both; and he concluded that by following these limits we never penetrate to the inner nature either of the object or of the subject, consequently never know the true nature of the world, the thing in itself. He did not deduce the thing in itself in the right way, as I shall show presently, but by means of an inconsistency, and he had to pay the penalty of this in frequent and irresistible attacks upon this important part of his teaching. He did not recognise the thing in itself directly in the will; but he made a great initial step towards this knowledge in that he explained the undeniable moral significance of human action as quite different from and not dependent upon the laws of the phenomenon, nor even explicable in accordance with them, but as something which touches the thing in itself directly: this is the second important point of view for estimating his services.