Thing In Itself Quotes

“We are not at all to wonder [...] that we having but some few superficial ideas of things, discovered to us only by the senses from without, or by the mind, reflecting on what it experiments in itself within, have no knowledge beyond that, much less of the internal constitution, and true nature of things, being destitute of faculties to attain it.”
― John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

“That our things are different from things in themselves may be made plain to us even by the simple opposition between a tone and the vibrations of the string that occasions it.”
― Friedrich Albert Lange, The History of Materialism and Criticism of Its Present Importance - Scholar's Choice Edition

“What the recent physiology of the senses has shown by the way of experience is what Kant had tried to show for the representations of the human mind in general when he laid out the participation of the particular, built-in rules of the mind, the organization of the mind as it were, in our representations.”
― Hermann von Helmholtz, Goethe's Vorahnungen Kommender Naturwissenschaftlicher Ideen: Rede, Gehalten in der Generalversammlung der Goethe-Gesellschaft zu Weimar den 11. Juni 1892 (Classic Reprint)