THE DOCTRINE OF ENERGY 97 



motionless visual presentation is really a series of 

 constant transmutations of Energy and the form of 

 Space is constituted by the laws of transmutation, 

 which are thus at once the necessary conditions of my 

 perception and the universal conditions of all sense- 

 perception. Space, therefore, does not contain the 

 real thing which sustains the phenomenal world any 

 more than it does the reality which underlies my 

 conscious self. It is the universal condition of the 

 transmutations which constitute phenomena ; and it 

 therefore " contains " all these phenomena, including 

 my body as phenomenon and only as phenomenon. 

 Its form is discovered by my organic motor activity, 

 and in representing this activity the mind constructs 

 its concepts of Space and Extension. 



This view of the nature of Space, by relating its 

 forms and laws with the objective, and a-logical thing- 

 in-itself in virtue of the transmutations of which our 

 sense-experience occurs, relieves an obvious difficulty 

 which must always have been felt in accepting with- 

 out qualification the purely Kantian view which 

 regarded it as a category imposed by the Intelli- 

 gence upon the otherwise unknowable world of sense. 



The most ardent assertors of the ideality of 



Space have hitherto apparently had difficulty in 



avoiding the tendency to conceive it as the persistent 



all-embracing objective content of the thing-in- 



7 



