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 every man must agree in it.  The laws which the understanding (not the individual understanding!) imposes upon nature hold for phenomena, because they hold for every man.  Objectivity is universal validity.  If the world of phenomena which is intuited and known by us wears a different 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 must represent the world> so it is, though for us, of course, and not in itself.

Many places in Kant’s works seem to argue against the intermediate position here ascribed to the world of phenomena—­according to which it is less than things in themselves and more than subjective representation—­which, since they explain the phenomenon as a mere representation, leave room for only two factors (on the one hand, the thing in itself = that in the thing which cannot be represented; on the other, the thing for me = my representation of the thing).  In fact, the distinction between the phenomenon “itself” and the representation which the individual now has of it and now does not have, is far from being everywhere adhered to with desirable clearness; and wherever it is impossible to substitute that which has been represented and that which may be represented or possible intuitions for “mere representations in me,” we must acknowledge that there is a departure from the standpoint which is assumed in some places with the greatest distinctness.  The latter finds unequivocal expression, among other places, in the “Analogies of Experience” and the “Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding,” Sec. 2, No. 4 (first edition).  The second of these passages speaks of one and the same universal experience, in which all perceptions are represented in thoroughgoing and regular connection, and of the thoroughgoing affinity of phenomena as the basis of the possibility of the association of representations.  This affinity is ascribed to the objects of the senses, not to the representations, whose association is rather the result of the affinity, and not to the things in themselves, in regard to which the understanding has no legislative power.