Appendix

The only possible standpoint is the third, transcendental realism. This assumes that there are “things-in-themselves”, but that the consciousness can have no kind of dealings with them in immediate experience. Beyond the sphere of human consciousness, and in a way that does not enter it, they cause the objects of our consciousness to arise in it. One can arrive at these “things-in-themselves” only by inference from the content of consciousness, which is all that is actually experienced but is nevertheless merely pictured in the mind.