| 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. |
| In experience alone are those objects, which are nothing but representations, given. |
| But, when I say they existed prior to my experience, this means only that I must begin with the perception present to me and follow the track indicated until I discover them in some part or region of experience. |
| The cause of the empirical condition of this progression--and consequently at what member therein I must stop, and at what point in the regress I am to find this member--is transcendental, and hence necessarily incognizable. |