PHENOMENA AND NO U MEN A. 369 things in themselves (in other words, to things in their rela- tion to the sensibility, and in relation to the understanding merely) ; and further, in a criticism of the philosophy of Leibnitz, reproaches him with having intellectualized phenomena, while Locke is said to have sensationalized the concepts of the understanding. The chapter on the distinction between phenomena and noumena very much lessens the hopes, aroused, perchance, by the establishment of the non-empirical origin of the cat- egories, for an application of these not confined to any ex- perience. ^Although the categories, that is, are in their origin entirely indepeadgnt of all experience (so much so that they first make experience possible), they are yet con- fined in their application within the bounds of possible ex- perience. They " serve only to spell phenomena, that we may be able to read them as experience, and when applied to things in themselves lose all significanc'e.* Similarly the principles which spring from them are " nothing more than
- ^->principles of possible experience," and can be referred to
phenomena alone, beyond which they are arbitrary combina- tions without objective reality. Things in themselves may be thought, but they can never be known ; for knowledge, besides the empty thought of an object, implies intuitions which must be subsumed under it or by which the object must be determined. In themselves the pure concepts relate to all that is thinkable, not merely to that which can be experienced, but the schemata, which assures their applica- . bjlity in the field of experience, at the same time linriit I ^ them to this sphere. The schematism makes the immanent, I use of the categories, and thus a metaphysics of phenomena, j 1 I * " A pure use of the categories is no doubt possible, that is, not self-contra- dictory, but it has no kind of objective validity, because it refers to no intuition to which it is meant to impart the unity of an object. The categories remain I forever mere functions of thought by which no object can be given to me, but by which I can only think whatever may be given to me in intuition " {Critique of Pure Reason, Max Muller's translation, vol. ii. p. 220. Without the con- dition of sensuous intuition, for which they supply the synthesis, the categories have no relation to any definite object ; for without this condition they contain nothing but the logical function, or the form of the concept, by means of which alone nothing can be known and distinguished as to any object belonging to it (Ibid., pp. 213, 214).
