How did Kant think the mind organizes sense impressions?

In his philosophy, Immanuel Kant argued that the human mind does not passively receive information from the world; rather, it actively organizes sense impressions to construct coherent experience. He compared this reorientation of epistemology to the Copernican revolution, asserting that objects must conform to the requirements of human sensibility and rationality.123

The mind organizes these impressions through a hierarchical structure of a priori factors:

• Forms of Sensibility: At the most fundamental level, the mind imposes the forms of space and time upon sensory data. These are necessary conditions for any experience to occur.14
• Categories of the Understanding: Once data is situated in space and time, the mind further organizes it by applying "pure concepts" or categories, such as substance, causality, and necessity. These concepts are not derived from experience but are read into it to provide an intelligible structure.134

Through this process, the transcendental ego synthesizes raw sensations into phenomena—the objects of our experience—while the underlying things-in-themselves remain fundamentally unknowable.245