bodies. It is synonymous with extension or magnitude and "does 

 not depend upon our cogitation". 1 It "is an accident ... of a 

 body existing out of the mind". 2 Des Cartes, of course, as has 

 been already seen, held a quite similar view, and the influence of 

 this same doctrine is apparent upon the English philosophers, 

 Locke, Berkeley and Hume. But it is in this last trend of thought 

 that this conception of space as absolute and independent is seen 

 to be erroneous, when regarded in any other way than as a more 

 or less arbitrary assumption. Locke, in distinguishing the primary 

 from the secondary qualities, followed Galilei very closely, adopt- 

 ing even his terminology, but, by so doing, he got into difficulties 

 which, on that basis, were insuperable. Berkeley and Hume, as 

 has been indicated, found certain difficulties in this view from the 

 standpoint of what they called knowledge obtained through ideas, 

 and were able to make valuable suggestions towards its solution. 

 But, notwithstanding their efforts, the older theory of space re- 

 mained firmly established in the mathematics and physics of the 

 day, and this made it necessary for Kant to approach this problem. 

 The question all the more imperatively demanded attention 

 because the view of space, advanced by Hume, as well as that 

 held by Leibnitz, which made space a confused idea of the rela- 

 tion of monads themselves non-spacial, was thought to be irrecon- 

 cilable with the actual results of the special sciences. On the 

 former view, that of the physical sciences, the world of space and 

 motion, abstracted from all supposed subjective content, seemed 

 to present a field of operation for the "rational and universal" 

 procedure of mathematics. On the empirtcal view, if all our know- 

 ledge results from experience and experience consists in con- 

 tinued perceptions or the succession of impressions and ideas, 

 then there are no universality and necessity, but only the observed 

 uniformities, which may be disarranged by the appearance of a 

 totally different and unexpected event. This dilemma or this 

 opposition naturally brings forward the question as to the validity 

 of the claim of the rationalistic or mathematical side for univer- 

 sality, and, in a word, produces the query, how are such universal 

 and necessary judgments at all possible ? This was exactly the 

 question which Kant faced. 



1 De Corpore, Ch. VIII, Par. 4. 



2 Ibid. 



98 



