Our reason sees around itself, as it were, a space for the cognition of things in themselves, although it can never have determinate concepts of them and is restricted to appearances only.
Prolegomena §57, AA 4:352.25–27, said "gleichsam", as it were, in the terms of the definition of a limit just given (4:352.21–23): a limit presupposes a space outside the enclosed place. The restriction "nur auf Erscheinungen" (4:352.27) is the first paragraph's restriction of cognition to possible experience (4:350.21–26) in other words, and the concession that reason can have no determinate concept of things in themselves is the unknowability claim of A 42 / B 59; the "space" is what makes the restriction a limit and not a mere bound.
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