Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/484

 470 c. M. WALSH: KANT'S TBANSCENDENTAL The other ambiguously used term which helps is the word " phenomenon ". This may mean both the appearance of a thing and the thing which appears. Thus my representa- tion, only in me, of a wall outside me, is an appearance or phenomenon of the wall outside me ; but also the wall outside me may itself be called a phenomenon because it appears to me through the medium of its representation or appearance in me. Then because the wall outside me is a phenomenon in this one sense of the term, it is easy to take it as a phenomenon in the other sense, that is, as an appear- ance or representation of still another thing outside, which is the thing-in-itself. To be sure, this other thing could be treated in the same way, and so on without end. But in such sequences there is a tendency to be satisfied with three terms, which furnish a beginning, middle and end. Such is the use Kant makes of the word. 1 The thing-in-itself and the representation he held resolutely apart. But between them he put a something which he called a phenomenon (and also even a representation), to which he gave the nature of both that of the thing-in-itself by making it a distinct outside object, and that of the representation proper by treating it as the representation of something else and by putting it also in us. The intermediary character of the objects which Kant calls real phenomena, according to this one of his two ways of conceiving of empirically real things, calls for especial attention. Our individual worlds are wholly subjective, the world of things-in-them selves is wholly objec- tive, but this world of outside phenomena is both subjective and objective. 2 Again, the objects in our individual worlds have both the primary and the secondary qualities ; things- in-themselves, according to the Transcendental Idealism, have neither the primary nor the secondary qualities; but these outside phenomena in the one phenomenal world have the primary but not the secondary qualities. 3 And because of this intermediary nature of phenomena Kant was able, 1 The three are mentioned together in iv., 37 : (1) " Vorstellungen welche ihr [der Korper] Einfluss auf unsere Sinnlichkeit uns verschafft " ; (2) "Dinge, . . . denen wir die Benennung eines Korpers geben, welches Wort also bios die Erscheinung . . . bedeutet"; (3) "jener unbekannte aber nichts desto weniger wirkliche Gegenstand ". 2 Cf. iii., 74, where rain-drops are allowed, physically understood, to be things-in-themselves, i.e. objective things, compared with the rain- bow (or with colours) ; but compared with the things-in-themselves proper, they are said to be only modifications in us, i.e. subjective. (See also 64.) 3 Cf. the preceding, and see also iii., 63 n. ; iv., 38 ; viii., 529 (Ueber die Fortschritte der Metaphysik).