Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason — trans. F. Max Müller
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Of Time 31
ceived, its quality therefore remaining always problematical), the other, when the form of the perception of the object is taken into consideration ; this form belonging not to the object in itself, but to the subject which perceives it, though nevertheless belonging really and necessarily to the object as a phenomenon.
Time and space are therefore two sources of knowledge from which various ^ /n^?''2 synthetical cognitions [p. 39] can be derived. Of this pure mathematics give a splendid example in the case of our cognitions of space and its various relations. As they are both pure forms of sensuous intuition, they render synthetical propositions a priori possible. But these sources of knowledge a priori (being conditions of our sensibility only) fix their own limits, in that they can refer to objects only in so far as they are considered as phenomena, but cannot represent things as they are by themselves. That is the only field in which they are valid ; beyond it they admit of no objective application. This ideality of space and time, however, leaves the truthfulness of our experience quite untouched, because we are equally sure of it, whether these forms are inherent in things by themselves, or by necessity in our intuition of them only. Those, on the contrary, who maintain the absolute reality of space and time, whether as subsisting or only as inherent, must come into conflict with the principles of experience itself. For if they admit space and time as subsisting (which is generally the view of mathematical students of nature) they have to admit two eternal infinite and self-subsisting nonentities (space and time), which exist without their being anything real, only in order to comprehend all that is real. If they take the second view (held by some metaphysical students [p. 40]
32 Of Tune of nature), and look upon space and time as relations of phenomena, simultaneous or successive, abstracted from experience, though represented confusedly in their abstracted form, they are obliged to deny to mathematical propositions a priori their validity with regard to real things (for instance in space), or at all events their apodictic certainty, which cannot take place a posteriori^ while the a priori conceptions of space and time are, according to their opinion, creations of our imagination only. Their source, they hold, must really be looked for in experience, imagination framing out of the relations abstracted from experience something which contains the general character of these relations, but which cannot exist without the restrictions which nature has imposed on them. The former gain so much that they keep at least the sphere of phenomena free for mathematical propositions ; but, as soon as the understanding endeavours to transcend that sphere, they become bewildered by these very conditions. The latter have this advantage that they are not bewildered by the representations of space and time when they wish to form judgments of objects, not as phenomena, but only as considered by the understanding; but they can neither account for the possibility of mathematical knowledge a priori (there being, according to them, no true and objectively valid intuition a priori), nor can they bring the laws of experience into true harmony with the a priori doctrines of mathematics. According to our theory of the true character of these original [p. 41] forms of sensibility, both difficulties vanish.
Lastly, that transcendental aesthetic cannot contain more than these two elements, namely, space and time, becomes clear from the fact that all other concepts belongOf Time 33
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