1907-8.] ; SPACE AND ITs DIMENSIONS. 325 
modern psychology can regard the spacial properties and relations as 
objective unless he means by objective the product of some abstraction 
from the subjective, or as Wundt views it, the one of the two abstractive 
aspects of the ‘‘presentation-object’’ which latter is at the same time 
subjective and objective. 
All doctrines which duplicate the given facts by setting them once as 
external objects and again as presentations in the mind, must as far as 
knowledge i.e., certainty is concerned, be regarded as utterly untenable. 
I cannot understand how a modern philosopher or psychologist can make 
a statement such as that found in Stout’s Analytical Psychology, which 
reads: “‘My idea of a triangle is not triangular.” He adds as an ex- 
planation, ‘‘for it is not made up of lines and angles.’ Certainly my idea 
of a triangle is made up of lines and angles, and certainly it is triangular, 
for my idea of a triangle is all I have of a triangle, it zs the triangle. If I 
speak of an extra triangle existing independently of me, that triangle can 
be nothing else than an idea or a complex of ideas. If Stout had at least 
said, the thing in itself which produces the triangle (my idea) may perhaps 
not be triangular, one might excuse it, for there have been greater men 
who spoke of the thing in itself and proved on the next page 
that one could not speak of the thing in itself. My idea of the triangle 
is the only triangle I know, and it is certainly triangular and made up of 
angles and straight lines. Thus it is absolutely senseless to state that our 
ideas of space are themselves not spacial* and if you ask those who make 
such statements what they mean by ‘‘our ideas of space’’ you will find that 
they are either unable to say what they mean, or their ideas of space 
reveal themselves in last instance as some molecular processes in the 
brain, which, of course, are spacial and subjective. For we can have 
no knowledge of the cerebral processes corresponding to our own states of 
consciousness, but connect consciousness and brain processes only in a 
course of inferences on the foundation of analogy, and the cerebral 
processes which I may observe in a dissected body or corpse, are 
again nothing but my states of consciousness. Thus we see that 
extension or space is not more objective, nor less subjective than the 
intensity of sensation. With regard to the application of the conception 
of magnitude to space, the advantage is just as much or even more on the 
side of intensity, as we shall try to show presently. 
At the basis of the statement that sensation as an intensive 
magnitude is not accessible to exact measurement lie two tacitly 
made assumptions which nevertheless are absolutely unjustified and 
groundless, namely, first, — that magnitude (and consequently measur- 
* Kisenhan’s Psychology. 
