or as something absolutely objective and unconditionally given, for if one tries to think this out it leads to contradictions. To accomplish this was the object of the antinomies, but in the appendix to my work I have proved the failure of the attempt. On the other hand, the Kantian doctrine, even without the antinomies, leads to the insight that things and the whole mode of their existence are inseparably bound up with our consciousness of them. Therefore whoever has distinctly grasped this soon attains to the conviction that the assumption that things also exist as such, apart from and independently of our consciousness, is really absurd. That we are so deeply involved in time, space, causality, and the whole regular process of experience which rests upon them, that we (and indeed the brutes) are so perfectly at home, and know how to find our way from the first – this would not be possible if our intellect were one thing and things another, but can only be explained from the fact that both constitute one whole, the intellect itself creates that order, and exists only for things, while they, on the other hand, exist only for it.
But even apart from the deep insight, which only the Kantian philosophy gives, the inadmissibility of the assumption of absolute realism which is so obstinately clung to may be directly shown, or at least made capable of being felt, by the simple exhibition of its meaning in the light of such considerations as the following. According to realism, the world is supposed to exist, as we know it, independently of this knowledge. Let us once, then, remove all percipient beings from it, and leave only unorganised and vegetable nature. Rock, tree, and brook are there, and the blue heaven; sun, moon, and stars light this world, as before; yet certainly in vain, for there is no eye to see it. Let us now in addition place in it a percipient being. Now that world presents itself again in his brain, and repeats itself within it precisely as it was formerly without it. Thus to the first world a second has been added, which, although
