  Though perhaps rhetorically effective, this argument leads to a basic tension in Vaihinger’s early view. Vaihinger sums up Lange’s conclusion as follows: “the result of the physiology of the senses is that we do not … perceive external objects, but rather ourselves first produce the appearance of such things, specifically as a consequence of the affection by transcendent objects” (1876, 56). These appearances are the result of our “physiological organization” operating on sensory stimuli. But he goes on to concede that this “‘organization’ signifies only the unknown … Y whose collaboration with the ‘thing in itself’, X, produces the world of inner and outer experience” (1876, 57), that “even our own body … is only a product of our optical apparatus” (1876, 57), and that “not merely the external world, but also the organs with which we grasp it are mere images of what truly exists, which itself remains unknown to us” (1876, 58).