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Prisoners of our own forms?

If the mind gives form to everything that appears to it, we never know things as they are, but only as they appear to us.

Objects to Criticism

1. Criticism grants that space, time and causality are not in things but are forms the mind imposes on every possible experience.
2. But then everything we know has already passed through that filter: we reach the phenomenon, the thing as it appears to us, never the thing in itself, as it would be independently of our forms.
3. Knowledge gains in rigor what it loses in reach: it holds for the world of our experience, but locks us within our own frames, without ever giving us the real as it is.

Therefore So the synthesis has a price: either one accepts knowing only appearances, or one seeks to reach the real otherwise, on the side of what the senses give or of what reason grasps.