It would be superfluous to multiply quotations in support of a position which even those who try to explain it away must admit to have been held by Kant. I will, therefore, quote only one typical passage from the Prolegomena in which he elaborately distinguishes his own doctrine from that of Idealism: –
"Idealism consists in the assertion that there are no other than thinking beings; that the other things which we believe ourselves to perceive are only ideas in thinking beings – ideas to which in fact there is no correspondent object outside of or beyond the thinking beings. I, on the contrary, say, Things are given to us as objects of our senses, external to us; but of what they may be in themselves we know nothing, knowing only their appearances, that is, the ideas which they cause in us by affecting our senses. Accordingly I certainly admit that there are bodies external to us, that is, things which, although wholly unknown to us as regards what they may be in themselves, we yet know through the ideas which their influence upon our sensibility supplies us with, and to which we give the appellation body: which word signifies, therefore, only the appearance of that to us unknown, but not the less real, object. Can this be called Idealism? Surely it is precisely the opposite." He declares roundly elsewhere "that it never entered his head to doubt the existence of independent things (Sachen)." Kant (in the passage quoted and elsewhere) assumes independent things not only as existent, but as the trans-subjective cause of our sense-affections. How else, he says, could the knowing faculty be roused to exercise, if not by objects which affect our senses? The position is to Kant so much a matter of course that he does not stop to argue it. And so it remained to the end. To interpret such statements as preliminary or provisional on Kant's part is completely unwarranted. If they had been a piece of exoteric condescension or accommodation to the untrained minds of his readers – if he had been merely educating these readers up to a point of view which would transform their whole conception of the universe and render the thing-in-itself an unnecessary adjunct – then Kant must have given us some hint at least of this
