< Space and Time (continued from page 4-178) >
Space, he said, is the subjective a priori form of sensibility. It does not belong, any more than the sensations which represent the matter of the unknown object, to the latter. The phenomenal object, therefore, is presented to us without any consciousness on our part of having been concerned in its production. It is precisely because we have no choice in the matter, because the sensibility must, by its own inherent conditions, be affected thus and in no other way, that we ascribe independent objectivity to the phenomenon; just as, up to the time of Copernicus, men assumed that the to them necessarily apparent motions of the heavens were the real motions. Kant, indeed, compares his own proceeding in metaphysics to that of Copernicus in astronomy. “We here propose,” he says, in the Preface to the second edition, “to do just what Copernicus did in attempting to explain the celestial movements. When he found that he could make no progress by assuming that all the heavenly bodies revolved round the spectator, he reversed the process, and tried the experiment of assuming that the spectator revolved, while the stars remained at rest. We may make the same experiment with regard to the intuition of objects. If the intuition must conform to the nature of the objects, I do not see how we can know anything of them a priori. If, on the other hand, the object conforms to the nature of our faculty of intuition, I can then easily conceive the possibility of such an a priori knowledge.” This a priori knowledge, which mere experience, and, therefore, a mere conformity of subject to object, could never give us, is mathematical science. The propositions about space and its relations, which geometry is concerned with, could never possess their apodeictic certainty if we obtained our conception of space from experience. These propositions are synthetic and a priori. They are synthetic and not analytic, because the predicate in them tells us more about space and its relations than is already contained in the subject. They are a priori, because experience, while it conforms to them, could never present us with one of them as necessary and universal. And because these propositions respecting space are synthetic and likewise a priori, it is evident that space is not a conception, but an intuition. For as, on the one hand, an empirical conception can obtain from experience an addition which enables a synthetic proposition to arise from it—as in the judgment “all bodies are heavy,” but-yet these propositions can never claim either necessity or universality, so, on the other hand, an a priori conception which does give rise to necessary and universal propositions can yet never go out of itself or give rise to a synthetic judgment, inasmuch as it has nothing but its own content from which the materials of such a judgment can be drawn. The necessary and universal fundamental truths of space, or axioms of geometry, therefore, are seen in an intuition, and not evolved from conceptions. “It is therefore not merely possible or probable,” says Kant, “but indubitably certain, that Space and Time, as the necessary conditions of all our external and internal experience, are merely subjective conditions of all our intuitions, in relation to which all objects are therefore mere phenomena, and not things in themselves, presented to us in this particular manner. And for this reason, in respect to the form of phenomena, much may be said a priori, whilst of the thing in itself, which may lie at the foundation of these phenomena, it is impossible to say anything.”
I am unwilling to detain you, but still more unwilling to pass over in silence another consideration which many minds may more easily assimilate than the foregoing. This is the relativity of space dimensions to the faculty of perception, The “wonders of the microscope” are a well-worn topic. It almost bores us now to hear of the millions of animals which live and move and have their being in a space which is less than the minimum visible to the human eye. And this is so because the one lesson of the microscope which is the most consequent and significant we have failed to realise: that lesson is the relativity of space to organism, The microscope notwithstanding, the yard to us remains the absolute yard, the mile the absolute mile. If it was the question of a truth discerned by the intellect this would be reasonable. Being a question of the senses, we are bound to admit the equality of the animalcule, which sees with other eyes than ours. The yard of the animalcule is not our yard, but it is just as much a yard as ours. It is a yard to it just as our yard is a yard to us. In other words, the dimensions of Space are relative only to the organs that measure them. The mite has a world as large as that which we can compass by our senses; and that world is comprised in what, to our senses, is little more than a point. Nor is there any difficulty in conceiving that to another faculty of intuition our whole visible universe might be invisible by reason of its extreme minuteness. Are we not irresistibly led to conclude that that which thus varies with the sense is but the form of the sense? Thus regarded, the phenomena of space—the objective world—are not illusions but manifestations. The body, for instance, is a manifestation of me, but not only of me as a spirit, but also of those lower forms of spirit which we classify as the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms, worked up into a higher organism. If I was to drop dead before you, my body would, therefore, not vanish from your sight, because it manifests other spiritual elements than that which is essentially me, and which elements are only gradually withdrawn from organic combination. We must, however, admit the possibility of an instantaneous withdrawal of all the elements of which body is the manifestation. What these lower elements are we cannot say, but I conceive them as the congestion of spirit, originally intelligent force ultimated into an action that has become automatic, constant, unvarying as definite function, or still lower, as what must needs appear to us the inaction of so-called dead matter. But if from any cause its free circulation is restored, and it is thus able to withdraw itself, or to be withdrawn either from its static apathy, or from its monotonous action, then will its manifestation, as dead matter or subordinate function, also cease or change. That this liberation should be instantaneous ought to be no more surprising than that chemical conversion when the proper elements are brought together in the right proportions is instantaneous instead of being gradual as we see it in most of the processes of nature. Those phenomena, therefore, of which there are many on record, of the sudden disappearance of a human body from view of the spectators, is as conceivable upon metaphysical principles as upon the theory of mesmerism, which is sometimes adopted; and to the same category belong other phenomena, which some of us have witnessed, which do not seem to admit of the latter explanation. I mean those cases of solid objects disappearing and reappearing at distant places, to which other solid obstacles would prevent their physical carriage. If, for instance, I do not accept the story of Mrs. Guppy’s miscalled flight from Holloway to Lamb’s Conduit-street, it is not because I see anything at all incredible in it, but because the evidence has failed, in this particular instance, to satisfy me of the fact as proven, though I think it very probably is true. No Spiritualist, of course, is absurd enough to suppose that there was an actual flight through space of Mrs. Guppy’s phenomenal body. It is generally described as a disintegration in one place and a reintegration in another. Those who would charge us with ignorance of the indestructibility of matter may be referred for a reply to the well-known work of two of the greatest of English physicists, The Unseen Universe.
To prevent misapprehension, it may be well to add that I do not regard objective manifestation under the form of space as being peculiar to our present state. The psychic body of which there is such abundant evidence is a proof to the contrary. But probably in another and higher stage of our progress to the disembodied purity of spirit the conditions of space and time will lose much of their fixity, and though times and places will still exist for us as the forms of consciousness, a thought may suffice to carry us hither and thither, or rather to make the there to be here; and from the present to the past or future, or rather to make the then to be now. Only to spirit unincumbered by body, to pure spirit as the trinity, not of spirit, soul, and body, but of Being, Intelligence, and Force, transcendent, unmanifest, unrelated can we ascribe entire immunity from those conditions to which we are subject, and which give us time instead of eternity, place instead of state, and phenomena instead of being.
Although I have not embarrassed an already too obscure and imperfect exposition by references to the other original and universal form of phenomenal consciousness, Time, it <... continues on page 4-180 >