 and points out that, in this sense, his view is not idealism at all because the Critique consistently maintains that bodies exist in space and that we have immediate (non-inferential) knowledge of  them.[11] Secondly, Kant points out that his idealism is merely formal: he has argued only that the form of objects is due to our minds, not their matter (cf. Kant’s Dec. 4 1792 letter to J.S. Beck (Ak. 11:395)). While the form-matter distinction in Kant’s philosophy is a complex matter in its own right, Kant’s point seems to be that the matter of experience, the sensory content that is perceptually and conceptually structured by space and time, and the categories, respectively, is not generated by the mind itself, but is produced in our minds through affection by mind-independent objects, things in themselves (see, however,  section 3.4  for some reasons to be suspicious of the doctrine of “noumenal affection”). As he would write several years later in response to Eberhard, the Critique 