 Kant’s empirical realism—not in his technical sense, but in the broader sense that he accepts an appearance/reality distinction at the level of appearances (see Abela 2002)—is further deepened by his scientific realism: he accepts the existence of unobservable entities posited by our best scientific theories and holds that these entities are appearances (because they are in  space).[6]  Earlier, we saw texts whose prima facie meaning is that appearances exist, at least partly, in virtue of the contents of our representations of them. But it is clear that Kant cannot hold that the existence of an object in space is grounded in our direct perception of that object, for that would be incompatible with the existence of unperceived spatial objects.