A SPECIAL LOOK AT SPACE AND TIME.

Through scientific idealism, fully examined, Kant proved that matter is a manufacture of sense. We have not followed the order of his work, but have gone straight to the heart of it. His own beginning was the dissection of space and time. Still, he implied therein, if only in one remark, all that has here been stated.

"If I take [says Kant] from our representation of a body, all that the understanding thinks as belonging to it, as substance, force, divisibility, and also whatever belongs to sensation, as impenetrability, hardness, color, there is still something left us from this empirical intuition, namely extension and shape. These belong to pure intuition, which exists a priori in the mind, as a mere form of sensibility, and without any real object of the senses or any sensation."Students of Kant have known, in a general way, that he attributed "extension" to "bodies," as derived by them from a priori mind. Space is so derived; hence all things in space, which is the "form," the "condition" of their existence, must partake of its nature, which is pure extension, pure "given quantity," as he designates it. But why does the shape of a material body belong to "pure intuition," and come from mind? Simply because the shape (let it be of a stone) is merely the objected "synthesis of apprehension," in which the properties of the stone, as impressions of sense, are unified, but in accordance with their special variety. The shape is their "figurative synthesis," their "synthesis speciosa." Now, in the meaning of Kant, and in the nature of the case, space is made in precisely the same manner as a stone; only the stone is full of diverse properties—special effects on sense, got from some impinging background of matter—some "noumenon"—while space has no properties at all, except additions and divisions of itself—spaces. In other words, the stone is a special relation between mental synthesis and sensuous susceptibility, the latter being in particular impact with some noumenal non-ego, and being definitely filled from it. Space, on the other hand, is a general relation between the same mental synthesis and the same sensuous susceptibility, the latter holding no contents from any noumenon, yet being recipient to all possibility of noumenal impact. Hence, space is just "the synthesis of apprehension" itself, set in self-reflex, objected, phenomenated. The stone, in its unity, its form, its "shape," is this objected synthesis of apprehension, filled with certain sensuous effects. The synthesis of apprehension, again, as the condition of any special "shape" into which it may be stuffed, is of course a priori to the stuffed shape; so space is a priori to the stone in space. Once again, space is the outward representation, the very double to the eye, of the synthesis of apprehension; for space is just the visible synthesis of the apprehended—the transparent base of co-existence for all external things.

It must be remembered that the synthesis of apprehension, as the "mind" of "sense," is itself a double, containing the pure conjunctive unity of "unconscious understanding" as an active factor, and susceptibility to impact as a passive factor. In the conjoined relation of these two factors every material phenomenon gets to exist; so there must be some relation of space to every external object, and to all external objects—which is to say at once that space is infinite, both in extent and divisibility, so far as it can apply to objects at all.

And here, too, is the reason that the contained character, the constituent quality, of space—meaning what Kant termed the "form of the intuition"—is essentially plural. This constituent quality of space is a re-presentation of mind, as at once active and passive, receptive and reflexive—as fundamental a priori self-separateness. But space itself, as a whole, is the synthesis of this self-separateness. It is self-unity of self-separateness, materialized. Space, made of spaces, is a thing identical in form and contents. Kant said:

"Space re-presented as an object (as geometry really requires it to be) contains more than the mere form of the intuition; namely, a combination of the manifold given according to the form of sensibility into a representation that can be intuited; so the form of the intuition gives us merely the manifold, but the formal intuition gives unity of re-presentation. In the 'Æsthetic,' [the first division of The Critique of Pure Reason], I regarded this unity as belonging entirely to sensibility, for the purpose of indicating that it antecedes all conceptions, although it presupposes a synthesis which does not belong to sense, through which, however, all our conceptions of space and time are possible.... By means of this unity alone (the understanding determining the sensibility) space and time are given as intuitions."

It is easy enough to follow out the genesis of time, in the same way as the genesis of space. The constituent quality of space and time is the same in both, and is subject in both to the same act of synthesis, in order that the essential plurality of "the form of intuition" may be created into the unity of "the formal intuition" itself—the single thing, space or time. But time is the "form" of "in-ternal sense," as Kant put it, while space is the "form" of "ex-ternal sense"—sense being to Kant not its physical organs (which are matter), but mental susceptibility as distinguished from mental synthesis. Every phenomenon in space is made of active subjective-synthesis, passive subjective-susceptibility, and noumenal impact. Space and time themselves are made of the synthesis and the susceptibility alone. But pure synthesis, which means just pure identity of awareness, can have no "susceptibility," cannot be occupied, without change of state; and any change of state in a pure general awareness forms succession of states, or, as Kant said, "generates time." But conjunction, again, of synthesis and susceptibility must be the relating of separates, with reference to the objective as well as the subjective factor. As objective effect this relation is pure co-existence of separates in time, through outness from each other—space. All objects, impressions, "effects of sense," must take the order of time; but "objects of internal sense" (feelings, or emotions), having no direct filling from noumena, are not objects in space. Thus, while space is pure synthesis of apprehension ex-ternally objected, time is the same pure synthesis of apprehension in-ternally objected.