Objectives: To investigate antithetical theories of objects and examine the ways in which human knowledge and experience are shaped and determined by the things it apprehends. Key concepts: Thing-hood; appearance and properties; contradiction and conceivability; concept; perspective; skepsis; the atom; arkhē; metaphor, grammar, and word. Achievement of the work: The subjection of Kantian metaphysics to the rigorous philosophical methods of Nietzsche, and a radical re-evaluation of both the ‘thing-in-itself’ and the scientist’s need for the fundamental material object, the atom, as the building block of reality.