Abstract

Kant’s proposition that "things-in-themselves are unknowable" is the ultimate dilemma of subject-object dualism in Western philosophy for over two thousand years. Kant argued that humans can only know phenomena and cannot grasp the primordial being of things themselves, a conclusion that completely severed the connection between cognition and reality, undermining the legitimacy of metaphysics and leaving an irreparable crack in the objectivity of scientific knowledge. Based on Cognitive Succession Ontology, this paper takes the unfalsifiable first principle that "the essence of cognition is succession" as its starting point, and rigorously proves through strict logical deduction that generalized things-in-themselves (including unmanifested ontological spacetime and manifested authentic physical spacetime), though not directly perceivable, can be precisely known 1:1 through geometrized construction and logical retrospection. This paper further demonstrates that ontological spacetime, authentic physical spacetime, and cognitive logic share the same Universal Meta-Rule of Succession and possess underlying isomorphism; Kant’s so-called "a priori categories" are not inherent structures of the human mind but natural manifestations of the succession meta-rule at the cognitive level. This theory fundamentally resolves the thing-in-itself problem and subject-object dualism, providing a solid epistemological and ontological foundation for Cognitive Succession Ontology and the unification of the four fundamental forces.