There is another aspect which is the celebrated theme of The Critique of Pure Reason of Kant. The universe is a phenomenon, a tremendously conditioned process of not merely space and time, but something worse, the condition of knowing, to which the internal organ is subject. It is known very well that all objects are seen as they are in space and time. But why should it be that the awareness is forced to cognise objects only in space and time? Is it not indeed unpleasant to hear that anyone should be forced to do anything? Much worse, forced to know anything? Why should there be compulsion even to be aware of things in a prescribed manner? Why should it be that the objects are to look as if they are located in space and time only? Well, nobody can easily find an answer to this question. Man is brainwashed, as it were, so intensely and to such logical perfection that no one can think except in terms of space and time. Either a thing is in space and time, or no one can have any idea about anything. The conditioning principle behind all acts of perception through the senses is the space-time complex. One puts on ready-made spectacles when seeing things, and it is, thus, not a real seeing of things as they truly are in themselves. The spectacles are space and time. And, naturally, the nature of the object of perception will depend upon the type of spectacles that are used. If the glasses are changed, the things would appear different. Man has been provided with a pair of glasses, space and time, and no one can see anything except through these media. Also, no one can remove them and throw them away. These glasses are part and parcel of what the percipient is. They are sticking to man; nay, he is made of their very stuff! Man is a spatio-temporal phenomenon. Individuality is just that much. All this is evidently a very unsatisfactory state of affairs, agonising and annoying, that man should be in a concentration camp and that he should see things only in this way and not in any other way. We seem to be held up in a prison, and no one knows how we have got into this cell of bondage.

But the harassment is not over. It is not enough if man is punished only with this much. He has to be troubled further. There is something worse that is taking place within everyone, which points out that man is wholly wrong in believing that he is in a world of reality. There is nothing finally real in this world, and even if there be something real, somewhere, no one knows it. The reason is, on the one hand, the condition to which everyone is subject on account of the operation of space and time. If these spectacles were to be cast away and then one is to look at things, well, perhaps, they may appear in a different shape. But this is not to be. The worst thing that is happening is within oneself, in the internal organ, in the mind itself. It can think only in certain ways. Just as the senses can see only through space and time and in no other way, the mind can think only in certain given ways and in no other way. Everyone is, thus, doubly conditioned through the senses and also through the mind. What are these conditions to which the mind is subject and in terms of which alone it can think always? The psychological spectacles are quantity, quality, relation and modality, says Kant. This is a bare outline in a few sentences, which Kant expounds in some eight hundred pages.

The difficulty is that no one can know anything unless it is associated with the fourfold facets mentioned. A characteristic or a definition is always clubbed with a thing. Else, what it is cannot be known. Every object has certain defining features. These characteristics are what are called the qualities. And there are many characteristics which cannot be counted. There is colour, there is height, there is weight and there are umpteen things which can be associated with an object. This is what is called a definition. A particular object can be defined by naming it in terms of the qualities which are associated with its quantity, which is the object. Quantity and quality go together; they cannot be separated.

And, everything is related to something else. The very act of the recognition of the presence of an object is due to the relation that it has with something else, a thing which no one is able to cogitate upon. When one says, 'Here is a white wall,' does one think that he is making an innocent statement? No, the whiteness of the wall has become an object of perception because of there being non-white things around it. If there is no non-white, whiteness cannot be seen. So there is a relation of the white to the non-white, and there is an infinite series of these relations. Everything is hanging on something else, so that no one knows one thing unless the characteristics of another thing are assumed at the same time. This is another difficulty to which the mind is put in its knowledge of things so that nothing can be known isolatedly. 'A' cannot be known without knowing 'B', 'B' cannot be known without knowing 'C', and so on. So, no one knows where one is and what one is knowing. The objects which are assumed to be quantities and are defined by qualities are also known through relations which obtain among things. And every object exists in a condition, a situation, a circumstance, a state of affairs, which is called a mode. Everything is in some condition. A state of affairs in which anything is found is the mode of that particular object, the thing.

Thus, mainly, these are the four ways in which the mind can think, viz., quantity, quality, relation and mode. There is no other way of thinking. Even when one thinks of God, the Almighty, one can think only in terms of quantity, quality, relation and mode. So, Kant tells us, there is no such thing as the metaphysics of the existence of God. Such a thing is not possible, if by God is meant Reality as such. He goes to the extent of demolishing the very possibility of knowing the existence of such a thing as God by rational investigation, on account of this peculiarity in which one is placed, namely, the conditioning of oneself in space-time and the various other categories which restrict the operation of the mind. He has formulated a list of the categories of the understanding, together with space and time, which are the spectacles through which everyone sees or knows things in perception.

There is a third faculty, called reason, in man, regulating sensory operation, the functions of the understanding, and the assumptions of the intellect. Here, in his evaluation of the functions of reason, Kant is a little wrong, though he is pious in his intentions. He holds that the doctrine that God exists is only an assumption, and it cannot be anything more than an idea. The point is that reason itself is, again, an offshoot of the categories of the understanding. Then, what can reason argue about except things which are conditioned in this manner as mentioned already? If the argument, even about God Himself, is conditioned, how could one be sure that one is arguing about a real thing? Even God which is in one's mind is a part of the phenomenon of the universe of the categories. Everyone is in a world which is nothing but phenomena; and Reality, which he calls the 'Thing-in-Itself , cannot be known. No one can see it, because it is not an object of the thought or of the senses. It, thus, would seem to occupy a position which is assumed as a nail for the purpose of hanging this coat of the awareness of an object. It is an invisible nail that is somewhere, on which one has to fix the coat of knowledge. Why is it invisible? And how would knowledge be real if what it hangs on is only ideal? Visibility is the act of the senses and the mind, and the senses and the mind are conditioned in the way described. Hence, unconditioned things cannot be thought by the mind, and God is unconditioned, it is said. Unconditioned being cannot be comprehended by the conditioned mind. And there are but conditioned minds in this world. So, thinking God is an impossibility. And, if metaphysics is a description of the nature of Reality, such as the existence of God, it does not exist. Kant, here, forgets that it would not have been possible to know that things are phenomenal, but for the fact that the reason has in its bosom a noumenal root, which, actually, is what the adumbrated Thing-in-Itself is.