Kant's View of Space

Abstract

You will perhaps permit me to make a remark on a controversy at present going on in your columns. There has seldom, I believe, been a grosser or more misleading perversion of the Critical Philosophy than ascribing to Kant the view that Space and Time are in any meaning of the terms “forms of thought.” One of his chief grounds of complaint against Leibnitz is, that the latter “intellectualised these forms of the sensibility” (Meiklejohn's Translation of the “Critick,” p. 198): and lest the import of this assertion should be mistaken, he explicitly tells us that “Space and Time are not merely forms of sensuous intuition, but intuitions themselves” (Meiklejohn's Trans., p. 98): that is, sensuous intuitions, as he has been just before asserting that all human intuitions must be. It is precisely on this distinction of pure sensibility and pure thought that Kant founds the possibility of Mathematics—a science which could never be derived from a mere analysis of the concepts employed, but only from the construction of them in intuition. He ridicules, for example, the idea of attempting to deduce the proposition, “Two right lines cannot enclose a space,” from the mere concepts or notions of a straight line and the number two. “All your endeavours,” says he, “are in vain, and you find yourself compelled to have recourse to intuition, as in fact Geometry always does.” (Meiklejohn, p. 39: see also his long contrast of Mathematical and dogmatical methods in the beginning of the “Methodology.”) And not only is Kant's Mathematical theory founded on this distinction but his Physical theory also, since it is only by means of pure intuition that he connects pure thought with sensations (see the “Schematism” and still more the “General Remark on the System of Principles,” Meiklejohn, pp. 174-7); and when he fails to make out this connection he regards the Ideas of Pure Reason as possessed of no objective validity (Transcendental Dialectic). In the first edition of the “Critick” he went still further, and in his remarks on the Second Paralogism of Rational Psychology he speaks of “that something which lies at the basis of external phenomena, which so affects our sense as to give it the representations of space, matter, form, &c.” And while he abbreviated his discussion in the second edition he tells us in his preface that he found nothing to alter in the views put forward in the previous one.