Peace's answer to this was very good. I'd just introduce a different phrasing here to express the same idea, but in a way that tends to "hit the right key" for me. The basic and most primordial aspect of you, the subject, is *transcendent*. Nothing, but by being *outside* of a system, can have knowledge of that system. Difference is key. A flake in the Frosted Flakes box cannot know about other flakes. If it were alive it may react instinctually and, more or less, by way of purely psychological kinds of learned responses. But it could not know. The intellective act is therefore carried out by a subject which transcends the system. We say the subject is transcendent with respect to the system. Now, contrast this term with *transcendental*. The faculties themselves by which you *do the intellective act of reasoning* here within the system are transcendental. Think of the transcendent as an upward pointing triangle, and transcendental as down. The union of these represents the subject experience you have here. Your intellect transcends this system, forming the grounds for you to know and pointing upward at the source. Descending and issuing from the mind are the faculties that *do the knowing*, the transcendentals, a priori things like cause and effect, space and time. The thing I believe you sense is what Kant called the "thing in itself". You sense that you are seeing the apparent, but not the *real*. There is a world behind the world. @PS