Noumenon

In the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the thing-in-itself (das Ding an sich) as opposed to what Kant called the phenomenon—the thing as it appears to an observer. Though the noumenal holds the contents of the intelligible world, Kant claimed that man’s speculative reason can only know phenomena and can never penetrate to the noumenon. Man, however, is not altogether excluded from the noumenal because practical reason—i.e., the capacity for acting as a moral agent—makes no sense unless a noumenal world is postulated in which freedom, God, and immortality abide.


Noumenon – Encyclopedia Britannica.com -  http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/420847/noumenon

Although we may never experience the noumenon, we all understand these abstract ideas in the form of senses, memory, and story.  We never experience the neumenon directly, but the phenomena around us tell us stories about our reality.