The famed philosopher Immanuel Kant gave this language in the eighteenth century: he said we perceive the phenomenal world, with its various familiar phenomena such as tables, and that there is also the other level that we know must be there but can’t experience: the noumenal world. ‘Noumenal’ comes from ‘nous’, in the sense of intuition; it describes the world we can intuit but not perceive – what lies beyond the reach of our senses. We can also talk of ‘things-in-themselves’ occupying this realm, rather than the ordinary ‘things’ that exist in our perceptions every day.
