282 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



ties were looked upon as the true characteristics of an 

 objective and real world, whereas the secondary quali- 

 ties were looked upon as the evanescent, changing, and 

 subjective appearance of this real world. Now for 

 those who believed in spiritual realities, i.e., in a higher 

 super-sensuous region of things, it became necessary in 

 some way or other to explain the relation of this super- 

 sensuous world to the actual world with which mathe- 

 matics and mechanics are concerned. 



As Paulsen has clearly shown, 1 two views existed 

 when Kant approached the problem the view of the 

 mathematicians, headed by Newton and more or less 

 adopted by English philosophers, and the view of the 

 metaphysicians, headed by Leibniz. 



The first view considers time and space (these being 

 the quantities with which mathematics and dynamics 

 operate) to be the actual receptacle of things. The 

 second view looks upon time and space, not as actual 

 things, but only as relations between things. This 

 latter view is intolerable to the scientific mind; but 

 it allows us to reduce reality to something quite dif- 

 ferent beneath and beyond the apparent forms of exist- 

 ence, and this may, in thought, be identified with the 

 supernatural. It thus saves the great spiritual verities, 

 relegating them to an order of things which we can 

 think but not directly experience. 



The other, or mathematical view, made natural the- 

 ology impossible, or reduced the theistic conception of 

 the Divine Being to a sort of pantheism, which collapsed 

 before the scepticism of Hume. 



1 'Immanuel Kant' (4th ed., 1904, p. 171 sqq.). 



