 Ultimately, however, there is a crucial limit to the subjective “field of consciousness.” As Kant demonstrated, subjective consciousness cannot reflect things as they are in themselves, but only as they appear when schematized according to subjective categories. What, then, is the ultimate place wherein the encounter between subjects and objects takes place, wherein persons and things coexist? According to Nishida, this must be the place wherein persons and things not only undergo changes in accidental categorical qualities, but wherein they essentially and existentially “come to be and pass away.” It is the place, not just of intellectual judgments, but of birth and death. This ultimate “groundless ground,” which “envelopes” all beings, yet which does so in such a way that lets them contain their own principle of self-determination, Nishida calls “the place of true nothingness.” Although in no sense a determinate being, neither is this place of true or absolute nothingness a mere static vacuity. It must be thought of as both the epistemic source of consciousness and the ontological origin of beings.