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< Space and Time (continued from page 4-177) >
but as containing these. Again, if you examine the empirical explanation which assimilates the conception of Space toconceptions derived from abstraction, you find a petition facti. One of Kant’s commentators, Kuno Fischer, puts this so clearly that I will take leave to quote him, from Mr. Mahafiy’s translation:— “But we might ask—nay, must ask—Out of what perceptions are space and time drawn? from what impressions are they abstracted? The only conceivable answer is this;—We perceive things as they exist out of us, and beside one another, as being either simultaneous or successive; out of these perceptions we abstract what they have in common—the general concept of being without and beside one another, and call this concept space; the general concept of being beside and after one another, and call this concept time; and so these two representations are formed apparently like all our other abstract concepts, We perceive things as they exist beside one another. What does existing beside one another mean? Either nothing at all, or that they are in different places. We perceive things as simultaneous and successive. Simultaneous can mean nothing but in the same point of time; successive nothing but in different times. What, then, do we perceive? Things as existing in different places, in the same or different points of time; this is simply to exist in space or time: so that the empirical explanation of space and time says merely this:—We perceive things as they are in space and time, and from that we abstract space and time. In other words, from space and time we abstract space and time! This is a perfect example of an explanation as it should not be. It explains the thing by itself. It presupposes, instead of explaining, what is to be explained. The explanation, then, or deduction, is as worthless as it is easy.”
Again, when we speak of space as infinite, we affirm a necessary truth, and one which experience certainly could not give us. We mean only that it is impossible to put a limit to Space in thought. What we assert is our power of transcending limits in imagination. We can construct yet more and more space. Space has been spoken of hitherto as a conception. But this is a misnomer. Space is not only not a conception derived from our experience of extended objects, but it is the a priori condition of the possibility of this experience. For we should make a great mistake if we concluded that Space is one of those “innate ideas” respecting which earlier metaphysical schools contended. It may have struck you that the necessity of Space was rather an argument for its objective or real existence than for its subjective character. You might admit that experience cannot give us a necessary conception, and also that this conception is radically unlike and even the exact reverse in character, of the general conceptions which experience does in fact give. But you might rather infer that a necessary conception represents something independent of the mind than that which is a conception only. The genesis of a conception, you may say, is one thing; its validity in relation to reality is another. In another part of Kant’s great work, for instance, the idea of God is shown to be a necessary idea of the pure reason, and though Kant held this idea incapable of verification, later thinkers whose idealistic tendencies were more developed than his, have found in this transcendent necessity of thought the predicate of existence indispensably involved. You might take your stand on the hypothetical “pre-established harmony” of Leibnitz, and might say to me, “if you can give no other account of the genesis of space than negatively that it is not derived from experience, it may yet well be that we are so constituted that our necessities of thought correspond with realities external to thought.” But, as it happens, we can give a further account of it than this negative one. We can show that it is not only a necessity of thought but a construction of the Ego, and that only by this process of construction is perception possible. I pray your attention to what follows. It is supposed that in perception the percipient is quite passive, and that the real extended object is impressed upon the sensibility as you might impress a figure on a sheet of paper. But the paper is not conscious, the percipient is. What is he conscious of? An extended object. But being extended, it is divisible, and if it is real, it must be infinitely divisible. For the real space must correspond with the necessities of the space that is thought, otherwise we have no ground at all for supposing it, and it is indeed for thought, nothing. And space in thought can be divided in infinitum, just as it can be extended in infinitum. Now, if I was at this point combatting the claim of the “object” to be real ornoumenal, or to be anything else than a phenomenon of consciousness, without prejudice to its unknown cause, this infinite divisibility which it has by reason of its spatial form would be alone sufficient to disprove that claim. For existence implies unity, and, except ideally, a whole or aggregate has no unity, unity belonging only to its ultimate elements or parts. The unity we ascribe to an organism, for instance, is not a real unity, or an unity of existence, but refers only to a relation of parts, resulting in structure and function. But an extended object—an object in space—can have no such ultimate elements or parts; and the indivisible atom of the materialists, if it exists, must needs exist out of space. Nor could the aggregation of any number of such extra-spatial atoms, being thus not homogeneous with phenomenal matter, result in one extended molecule, or build up an universe perceptible to sense. Thus the philosophic materialist must needs be at one with the idealist as to the phenomenal character of the world of sense, and if so-called scientific materialists would only keep this fact constantly and consistently in view we should hear less of that continual disparagement of metaphysics which comes so strangely from those whose systems must rest upon a transcendental ontology. But since I am now endeavouring to show the very genesis of space as a construction of the ego—this is a digression, though not an irrelevant one—it is obvious then, that to constitute an object of the sense, whether of sight or touch, there must be a synthesis, or putting together of the parts of that object. Now, what, for consciousness, are those parts? The answer readily presents itself that they are minima visibilia, or minima tangibilia, the smallest surfaces that can affect the consciousness. But then, by the very nature of sense perception, they are still surfaces; still extensions. The smallest visible speck or point is yet not the mathematical point, but has sides which look to the infinite north, south, east, and west of it. It occupies an ex hypothesi appreciable portion of space. Thus we cannot begin our synthesis with this minimum, but this minimum itself is the result of a prior synthesis, and that synthesis, pray mark, is not a synthesis in consciousness, because it is already accomplished before consciousness commences. Now what accomplishes it? If it is replied that the invisible parts are aggregated to a visible dimension, and then impress the sensibility, how, I ask, can their collective action be other than the several action of the parts? But, ex concesso, the parts cannot affect the sensibility. I need hardly observe that the difficulty is not even for the moment evaded by considerations of the physiological mechanism of sensation (even if such considerations were not wholly out of place in metaphysical inquiries, however necessary an adjunct they may be to psychology), for it is just as difficult to explain why a strong nerve vibration, or half a dozen vibrations should result in consciousness, as why a weak or a single one should do so. All we can say of the relation of consciousness to its immediate physical antecedents or concomitants is all that we can say of its relation to the supposed real object, namely, that it is just so-and-so. If, however, we call in aid an unknown substratum of consciousness itself, and say that the several impressions of the invisible parts of the object may affect it, and accumulating therein, emerge in consciousness as the extensive minimum of the latter, then it is plain that we transfer the scene and effective operation of the synthesis to this unknown force or substance. That, however, is to give up to me the very position which I am contending for, namely, that Space is a subjective construction. But if a subjective construction, we have no warrant whatever for supposing it to be also an objective fact, in the noumenal as opposed to the phenomenal sense of the word objective. There is no such putting together of impossible pre-existent parts as is presupposed in realism, but a continuous construction, just as we may draw a line on a paper, or by imagination. Spatial perception is imagination, not in its connoted sense of illusion, but in its literal meaning of the construction of an image. Kant, however, expressly disclaimed attributing activity to the subject in mere sensibility. <... continues on page 4-179 >