in INTELLECT AND MATERIALITY 215 



each other without changing in themselves (which are 

 &quot; displaced,&quot; shall we say, without being &quot; altered &quot;), in 

 short, in conferring on matter the properties of pure 

 space, we are transporting ourselves to the terminal 

 point of the movement of which matter simply 

 indicates the direction ? 



What the Transcendental Aesthetic of Kant appears 

 to have established once for all is that extension is 

 not a material attribute of the same kind as others. 

 We cannot reason indefinitely on the notions of heat, 

 colour, or weight : in order to know the modalities 

 of weight or of heat, we must have recourse to 

 experience. Not so of the notion of space. Supposing 

 even that it is given empirically by sight and touch (and 

 Kant has not questioned the fact) there is this about it 

 that is remarkable that our mind, speculating on it with 

 its own powers alone, cuts out in it, a priori, figures 

 whose properties we determine a priori : experience, 

 with which we have not kept in touch, yet follows us 

 through the infinite complications of our reasonings 

 and invariably justifies them. That is the fact. Kant 

 has set it in clear light. But the explanation of the 

 fact, we believe, must be sought in a different direction 

 to that which Kant followed. 



Intelligence, as Kant represents it to us, is bathed 

 in an atmosphere of spatiality to which it is as 

 inseparably united as the living body to the air it 

 breathes. Our perceptions reach us only after having 

 passed through this atmosphere. They have been 

 impregnated in advance by our geometry, so that our 

 faculty of thinking only finds again in matter the 

 mathematical properties which our faculty of per 

 ceiving has already deposed there. We are assured, 

 therefore, of seeing matter yield itself with docility 



