| That there may be inhabitants in the moon, although no one has ever observed them, must certainly be admitted; but this assertion means only, that we may in the possible progress of experience discover them at some future time. |
| For that which stands in connection with a perception according to the laws of the progress of experience is real. |
| They are therefore really existent, if they stand in empirical connection with my actual or real consciousness, although they are not in themselves real, that is, apart from the progress of experience. |
| There is nothing actually given--we can be conscious of nothing as real, except a perception and the empirical progression from it to other possible perceptions. |
| For phenomena, as mere representations, are real only in perception; and perception is, in fact, nothing but the reality of an empirical representation, that is, a phenomenon. |
| To call a phenomenon a real thing prior to perception means either that we must meet with this phenomenon in the progress of experience, or it means nothing at all. |
| For I can say only of a thing in itself that it exists without relation to the senses and experience. |
| But we are speaking here merely of phenomena in space and time, both of which are determinations of sensibility, and not of things in themselves. |
| It follows that phenomena are not things in themselves, but are mere representations, which if not given in us--in perception--are non-existent. |
| The faculty of sensuous intuition is properly a receptivity--a capacity of being affected in a certain manner by representations, the relation of which to each other is a pure intuition of space and time--the pure forms of sensibility. |
| These representations, in so far as they are connected and determinable in this relation (in space and time) according to laws of the unity of experience, are called objects. |
| The non-sensuous cause of these representations is completely unknown to us and hence cannot be intuited as an object. |
| For such an object could not be represented either in space or in time; and without these conditions intuition or representation is impossible. |
| We may, at the same time, term the non-sensuous cause of phenomena the transcendental object--but merely as a mental correlate to sensibility, considered as a receptivity. |
| To this transcendental object we may attribute the whole connection and extent of our possible perceptions, and say that it is given and exists in itself prior to all experience. |
| But the phenomena, corresponding to it, are not given as things in themselves, but in experience alone. |
| For they are mere representations, receiving from perceptions alone significance and relation to a real object, under the condition that this or that perception--indicating an object--is in complete connection with all others in accordance with the rules of the unity of experience. |
| Thus we can say; "The things that really existed in past time are given in the transcendental object of experience." But these are to me real objects, only in so far as I can represent to my own mind, that a regressive series of possible perceptions- following the indications of history, or the footsteps of cause and effect--in accordance with empirical laws--that, in one word, the course of the world conducts us to an elapsed series of time as the condition of the present time. |
| This series in past time is represented as real, not in itself, but only in connection with a possible experience. |
| Thus, when I say that certain events occurred in past time, I merely assert the possibility of prolonging the chain of experience, from the present perception, upwards to the conditions that determine it according to time. |
| If I represent to myself all objects existing in all space and time, I do not thereby place these in space and time prior to all experience; on the contrary, such a representation is nothing more than the notion of a possible experience, in its absolute completeness. |