 Maimon’s criticisms of Kant’s account of the thing in itself, however, are connected to a deeper concern about the notions of experience and cognition that stand at the heart of Kant’s critical idealism. Kant posits the thing in itself in large part because of his commitment to a type of cognitive dualism, in which human experience is taken to involve both a faculty of thought (the understanding), as well as a faculty of receptivity (sensibility). In order to have any content, experience requires data, which must be given to the subject through the senses. Moreover, the data of experience cannot be produced by the faculty of thought itself. The given content of sensibility plays an ineliminable role in cognition, and its source must ultimately be traced to the subject’s being affected by something distinct from itself, a role played by the thing in itself. But while the content of thought is provided by the affection of an object on the faculty of sensibility, the way in which this content is cognized remains the purview of the faculty of the understanding. Mere affection, in other words, is not equivalent to cognition. In Kant’s terms, the “understanding is not capable of intuiting anything, and the senses are not capable of thinking anything.” (A52/B56)