 Another way to appreciate this distinction is to consider the difference in why these notions of object (noumena, transcendental object) are unknowable by us. We cannot cognize things in themselves because cognition requires intuition, and our intuition only ever presents appearances, not things in themselves. We cannot cognize the transcendental object because the transcendental object is a purely schematic, general idea of empirical objectivity. Whenever we cognize a determinate empirical object we are cognitively deploying the transcendental concept of an object in general, but we are not coming to know anything about the object of that concept as such.