184 PHILOSOPHY 



utterances of our intelligent, our percipient nature. But when Kant 

 first helped mankind to the realization of this spontaneous (or 

 a priori) character of this pair of perceptive conditions, or Sense- 

 Forms, he fell into the persuasion, and led the philosophic world into 

 it, that though Time and Space are not derivatives of the One and 

 the Many read as the numerical aspect of our perceptive experiences, 

 yet there is between the two pairs a connection of dependence as 

 intimate as that first supposed, but in exactly the opposite sense; 

 namely, that the One and the Many are conditioned by Time and 

 Space, or, when it comes to the last resort, are at any rate completely 

 dependent upon Time. By a series of units, this view means, we really 

 understand a set of items discriminated and related either as points or 

 as instants: in the last analysis, as instants: that is, it is impossible 

 to apprehend a unit, or to count and sum units, unless the unit is taken 

 as an instant, and the units as so many instants. Numbers, Karit 

 holds, are no doubt pure (or quite unsensuous) percepts, -- dis- 

 cerned particulars, - - therefore spontaneous products of the mind 

 a priori, but made possible only by the primary pure percept Time, 

 or, again, through the mediation of this, by the conjoined pure per- 

 cept Space; so that the numbers, in their own pure character, are 

 simply the instants in their series. As the instants, and therefore the 

 numbers, are pure percepts, - - particulars discerned without the 

 help of sense, --so pure percepts, in a primal and comprehensive 

 sense, argues Kant, must their conditioning postulates Time and 

 Space be, to supply the "element," or "medium," that will render 

 such pure percepts possible. 



This doctrine of Kant's is certainly plausible; indeed, it is impress- 

 ively so; and it has taken a vast hold in the world of science, and 

 has reinforced the popular belief in the unreality of thought apart 

 from Time and Space; an unreality which it is an essential part of 

 Kant's system to establish critically. But as a graver result, it has 

 certainly tended to discredit the belief in personal identity as an 

 abiding and immutable reality, enthroned over the mutations of 

 things in Time and Space; since all that is in these is numbered and 

 is mutable, and is rather many than one, yet nothing is believed real 

 except as it falls under them, at any rate under Time. And with this 

 decline of the belief in a changeless self, has declined, almost as rapidly 

 and extensively, the belief in immortality. Or, rather, the per- 

 manence and the identity of the person has faded into a question 

 regarded as unanswerable ; though none the less does this agnostic 

 state of belief tend to take personality, in any responsible sense of 

 the word, out of the region of practical concern. With what is un- 

 knowable, even if existing, we can have no active traffic; 't is for 

 our conduct as if it were not. 



So it behooves us to search if this prevalent view about the relation 



