Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason — trans. F. Max Müller

coexistence a mode of time itself, because in it no parts can be coexistent, but successive only). If we were to ascribe a succession to time itself, it would be necessary to admit another time in which such succession should be possible. Only through the permanent does existence in different parts of a series of time assume a quantity which we call duration. For in mere succession existence always comes and goes, and never assumes the slightest quantity. Without something permanent therefore no relation of time is possible. Time by itself, however, cannot be perceived, and it is therefore the permanent in phenomena that forms the substratum for all determination of time, and at the same time the condition of the possibility of all synthetical unity of perceptions, that is, of experience ; while with regard to that permanent all existence and all change in time can only be taken as a mode of existence of what is permanent. In all phenomena therefore the permanent is the object itself, that is, the substance (phenomenon), while all that changes or can change [p. 184] belongs only to the mode in which substance or substances exist, therefore to their determinations.

I find that in all ages not only the philosopher, but also the man of common understanding has admitted this permanence as a substratum of all change of phenomena. It will be the same in future, only that a philosopher generally expresses himself somewhat more definitely by saying that in all changes in the world the substance remains, and only the accidents change. But I nowhere find even the attempt at a proof of this very synthetical proposition, and it occupies but seldom that place which it ought to occupy at the head of the pure and entirely a priori existing laws of nature. In fact the proposition

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that substance is permanent is tautological, because that permanence is the only ground why we apply the category of substance to a phenomenon, and it ought first to have been proved that there is in all phenomena something permanent, while the changeable is only a determination of its existence. But as such a proof can never be given dogmatically and as deduced from concepts, because it refers to a synthetical proposition a prioriy and as no one ever thought that such propositions could be valid only in reference to possible experience, and could therefore be proved only by a deduction of the possibility of [p. 185] experience, we need not wonder that, though it served as the foundation of all experience (being felt to be indispensable for every kind of empirical knowledge), it has never been established by proof.

A philosopher was asked. What is the weight of smoke .^ He replied, Deduct from the weight of the wood burnt the weight of the remaining ashes, and you have the weight of the smoke. He was therefore convinced that even in fire matter (substance) does not perish, but that its form only suffers a change. The proposition also, from nothing comes nothing, was only another conclusion from the same principle of permanence, or rather of the constant presence of the real subject in phenomena. For if that which people call substance in a phenomenon is to be the true substratum for all determination in time, then all existence in the past as well as the future must be determined in it, and in it only. Thus we can only give to a phenomenon the name of substance because we admit its existence at all times, which is not even fully expressed by the word permanence, because it refers rather to future time only. The internal necessity however of permanence

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