OF THE SPIRIT. 



283 



These being the two views which Kant found current l i. 



The recon- 



in the philosophy of his predecessors, he set to work ^nation, 

 to reconcile them, his object being to vindicate the 

 belief in the supernatural (or what he terms the 

 transcendent) whilst at the same time admitting the 

 correctness of the mechanical or mathematical view. 

 The reconciliation is attempted by the celebrated 

 doctrine of the ideality of time and space, i.e., the 

 view that time and space are the necessary forms 

 inherent in the human intellect in and through which 

 it arranges and conceives the manifold data of the 

 senses. Being inherent in the human mind, the science 

 which deals with the forms of time and space is a 

 necessary science ; necessary to us thinking beings and 

 inseparable from our knowledge of external things 

 which we see only in and through them. At the same 

 time this view, which implies the subjectivity or 

 unreality likewise of the primary qualities, leaves over, 

 as the real but unexplained kernel of reality, the 

 conception of a something which we can only think 

 but not describe : the " thing in itself," the cele- 

 brated X of Kantian philosophy. 



This conception of a " thing in itself," incorrectly 



1 "The two discarded views are 

 those through which Kant himself 

 had passed. . . . He stood origin- 

 ally in the position of German meta- 

 physics : space an empirical con- 

 ception, abstracted from the rela- 

 tions of external things. He then 

 went over to the second view 

 (Newton-Clarke) : space the pre- 

 existing form of the physical 

 world. This view, which he still 

 distinctly defends in 1768, he 



suddenly drops, evidently as meta- 

 physically insupportable, and 

 places himself in the new posi- 

 tion : space and time are a priori 

 forms of the physical world (as 

 Newton has it), but, together with 

 the physical world, existent only 

 in the sensuous aspect, which was 

 really also Leibniz'- opinion, as 

 Kant himself remarks. " (Paulsen, 

 loc. cit., p. 172 n.) 



