It can easily be shown by literal quotations that there were distinct tendencies in Kant, especially in the first edition of his principal work, toward a radical idealism which doubts or denies not merely the cognizability, but also the existence of objects external to the subject and its representations, and which degrades the thing in itself to a mere thought in us, or completely does away with it (e.g., “The representation of an object as a thing in general is not only insufficient, but, ... independently of empirical conditions, in itself contradictory “).  But these expressions indicate only a momentary inclination toward such a view, not a binding avowal of it, and they are outweighed by those in which idealism is more or less energetically rejected.  That which according to Kant exists outside the representation of the individual is twofold:  (1) the unknown things in themselves with their problematical characteristics, as the ground of phenomena; (2) the phenomena “themselves” with their knowable immanent laws, and their relations in space and time, as possible representations.  When I turn my glance away from the rose its redness vanishes, since this predicate belongs to it only in so far and so long as it acts in the light on my visual apparatus.  What, then, is left?  That thing in itself, of course, which, when it appears to me, calls forth in me the intuition of the rose.  But there is still something else remaining—­the phenomenon of the rose, with its size, its form, and its motion in the wind.  For these are predicates which must be attributed to the phenomenon itself as the object of my representation.  If the rose, as determined in space and time, vanished when I turned my head away, it could not, unless intuited by a subject, experience 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 phenomenon and does not first become real by my subsequent representation of it or inference to it.  The things and events of the phenomenal world exist both before and after my perception, 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, transcendental 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