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

quence (of an event or something happening that did not exist before) to the object, and distinguish it from the subjective sequence of our apprehension, except when there is a rule which forces us to observe a certain order of perceptions, and no other ; nay, that it is this force which from the first renders the representation of a [p. 197] succession in the object possible.

We have representations within us, and can become conscious of them ; but however far that consciousness may extend, and however accurate and minute it may be, yet the representations are always representations only, that is, internal determinations of our mind in this or that relation of time. What right have we then to add to these representations an object, or to ascribe to these modifications, beyond their subjective reality, another objective one } Their objective character cannot consist in their relation to another representation (of that which one wished to predicate of the object), for thus the question would only arise again, how that representation could again go beyond itself, and receive an objective character in addition to the subjective one, which belongs to it, as a determination of our mind. If we try to find out what new quality or dignity is imparted to our representations by their relation to an object, we find that it consists in nothing but the rendering necessary the connection of representations in a certain way, and subjecting them to a rule ; and that on the other hand they receive their objective character only because a certain order is necessary in the time relations of our representations.

In the synthesis of phenomena the manifold [p. 198] of our representations is always successive. No object can thus be represented, because through the succession

1 62 Trans cende7ital Analytic which is common to all apprehensions, nothing can be distin-guished from anything else. But as soon as I perceive or anticipate that there is in this succession a relation to an antecedent state from which the representation follows by rule, then something is represented as an event, or as something that happens : that is to say, I know an object to which I must assign a certain position in time, which, after the preceding state, cannot be different from what it is. If therefore I perceive that something happens, this representation involves that something preceded, because the phenomenon receives its position in time with reference to what preceded, that is, it exists after a time in which it did not exist. Its definite position in time can only be assigned to it, if in the antecedent state something is presupposed on which it always follows by rule. It thus follows that, first of all, I cannot invert the order, and place that which happens before that on which it follows; secondly, that whenever the antecedent state is there, the other event must follow inevitably and necessarily. Thus it happens that there arises an order among our representations, in which the present state [p. 199] (as having come to be), points to an antecedent state, as a correlative of the event that is given ; a correlative which, though as yet indefinite, refers as determining to the event, as its result, and connects that event with itself by necessity, in the succession of time.

If then it is a necessary law of our sensibility, and therefore a formal condition of all perception, that a preceding necessarily determines a succeeding time (because' I cannot arrive at the succeeding time except through the preceding), it is also an indispensable law of the empirical representation of the series of time that the phenomena of

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past time determine every existence in succeeding times, nay, that these, as events, cannot take place except so far as the former determine their existence in time, that is, determine it by rule. For it is of course in phenomena only that we can know empirically this continuity in the coherence of times.