These questions, when their real nature is exhibited, are plainly absurd. Kant's special theory, however, enables him to evade the real absurdity involved. For, according to his view, a representation is the representation or apprehension of something only from the point of view of the thing in itself. As an appearance or perhaps more strictly speaking as a sensation, it has also a being of its own which is not relative[25]; and from this point of view it _is_ possible to speak of 'mere' representations and to raise questions which presuppose their reality.[26]
[26] The absurdity of the problem really propounded is also concealed from Kant in the way indicated, pp. 180 fin.-181 init.
But this remedy, if remedy it can be called, is at least as bad as the disease. For, in the first place, the change of standpoint is necessarily illegitimate. An appearance or sensation is not from any point of view a representation in the proper sense, i. e. a representation or apprehension of something. It is simply a reality to be apprehended, of the special kind called mental. If it be called a representation, the word must have a new meaning; it must mean something represented, or presented,[27] i. e. object of apprehension, with the implication that what is presented, or is object of apprehension, is mental or a modification of the mind. Kant therefore only avoids the original absurdity by an illegitimate change of standpoint, the change being concealed by a tacit transition in the meaning of representation. In the second place, the change of standpoint only saves the main problem from being absurd by rendering it insoluble. For if a representation be taken to be an appearance or a sensation, the main problem becomes that of explaining how it is that, beginning with the apprehension of mere appearances or sensations, we come to apprehend an object, in the sense of an object in nature, which, as such, is not an appearance or sensation but a part of the physical world. But if the immediate object of apprehension were in this way confined to appearances, which are, to use Kant's phrase, determinations of our mind, our apprehension would be limited to these appearances, and any apprehension of an object in nature would be impossible.[28] In fact, it is just the view that the immediate object of apprehension consists in a determination of the mind which forms the basis of the solipsist position. Kant's own solution involves an absurdity at least as great as that involved in the thought of a mere representation, in the proper sense of representation. For the solution is that appearances or sensations become related to an object, in the sense of an object in nature, by being combined on certain principles. Yet it is plainly impossible to combine appearances or sensations into an object in nature. If a triangle, or a house, or 'a freezing of water'[29] is the result of any process of combination, the elements combined must be respectively lines, and bricks, and physical events; these are objects in the sense in which the whole produced by the combination is an object, and are certainly not appearances or sensations. Kant conceals the difficulty from himself by the use of language to which he is not entitled. For while his instances of objects are always of the kind indicated, he persists in calling the manifold combined 'representations', i. e. presented mental modifications. This procedure is of course facilitated for him by his view that nature is a phenomenon or appearance, but the difficulty which it presents to the reader culminates when he speaks of the very same representations as having both a subjective and an objective relation, i. e. as being both modifications of the mind and parts of nature.[30]