350 KANT. unless intuited by a subject, experierfce or exert effects in space and time, could not lose its leaves in the wind and strew the ground with its petals. Perception and thought inform me not merely concerning events of which I am a witness, but also of others which have occurred, or which will occur, in my absence. The process of stripping the leaves from the rose has actually taken place as a phenome- non and does not first become real by my subsequent repres- entation of it or inference to it. The things and events of the phenomenal world exist both before and after my per- ception, and are something distinct from my subjective and momentary representations of them. The space and time, however, in which they exist and happen are not furnished by the intuiting individual, but by the supra-individual, transce ftdental consciousness _or generic reason of the"~race. The phenomenon thus stands midway between its objective ground (the absolute thing in itself) and the subject, whose common product it is, as a relative thing in itself, as a reality which is independent of the contingent and changing representation of the individual, empirical subject, which is dependent for its form on the transcendental subject, and which is the only reality accessible to us, yet entirely valid for us. The phenomenal world is not a contingent . and individual phenomenon, but one necessary for all beings
- organized as we are, a phenomenon for humanity. My
representations are not the phenomena themselves, but images and signs through which I cognize phenomena, i. e.,
real things as they are for me and for every man (not as
they are in themselves). The reality of phenomena consists in the fact that they can be perceived by men, and the objective validity of my knowledge of them in the fact that I every man must agree in it. Xb£_jaws which the und er-) I standing (not the indijddual_^md ^sFandn Tgl ) impose sjipbn j in4ture hold for phenQgi ena, becaus e they hold for every _rnan. Objectivity is universal validity. If the world of phenomena which is intuited and known by us wears a dif- ferent appearance from the world of things in themselves, this does not justify us in declaring it to be mere seeming and dreaming; a dream which all dream together, and which all must dream, is not a dream, but reality. As we V
