er
words, an apprehension is always the apprehension of a reality, and a
reality apprehended, i. e. an object of apprehension, cannot be stated
in terms of the apprehension of it. We never confuse an apprehension
and its object; nor do we take the temporal relations which belong to
the one for the temporal relations which belong to the other, for
these relations involve different terms which are never confused, viz.
apprehensions and the objects apprehended. Now Kant, by his doctrine
of the unknowability of the thing in itself, has really deprived
himself of an object of apprehension or, in his language, of an
object of representations. For it is the thing in itself which is,
properly speaking, the object of the representations of which he is
thinking, i. e. representations of a reality in nature; and yet the
thing in itself, being on his view inapprehensible, can never be for
him an object in the proper sense, i. e. a reality apprehended. Hence
he is only able to state the fact of knowledge in terms of mere
apprehensions, or ideas, or representations--the particular name is a
matter of indifference--and consequently his efforts to recover an
object of apprehension are fruitless. As a matter of fact, these
efforts only result in the assertion that the object of
representations consists in the representations themselves related in
a certain necessary way. But this view is open to two fatal
objections. In the first place, a complex of representations is just
not an object in the proper sense, i. e. a reality apprehended. It
essentially falls on the subject side of the distinction between an
apprehension and the reality apprehended. The _complexity_ of a
complex of representations in no way divests it of the character which
it has as a complex of _representations_. In the second place, on this
view the same terms have to enter at once into two incompatible
relations. Representations have to be related successively as our
representations or apprehensions--as in fact they are related--and, at
the same time, successively or otherwise, as the case may be, as parts
of the object apprehended, viz. a reality in nature. In other words,
the same terms have to enter into both a subjective and an objective
relation, i. e. both a relation concerning us, the knowing subjects,
and a relation concerning the object which we know.[26] "A phenomenon
in opposition to the representations of apprehension can only be
represented as the object o