THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 273 



Such incoherency is pitiful. Tlie fact is that, at bottom, 

 all these authors are really 'psychical stimulists,' or Kant- 

 ists. The space they speak of is a super- sensational mental 

 product. This position appears to me thoroughly mj-tho- 

 logical. But let us see how it is held by those who know 

 more definitely what they mean. Schopenhauer expresses 

 the Kantian view with more vigor and clearness than any- 

 one else. He says : 



" A man must be forsaken by all the gods to dream that the world we 

 see outside of us, filling space in its three dimensions, moving down the 

 Inexorable stream of time, governed at each step by Causality's invariable 

 law, — but in all this only following rules which we may prescribe for it 

 in advance of all experience, — to dream, I say, that such a world should 

 stand there outside of us, quite objectively real with no complicity of 

 ours, and thereupon by a subsequent act, through the instrumentality 

 of mere sensation, that it should enter our head and reconstruct a dupli- 

 cate of itself as it was outside. For what a poverty-stricken thing is this 

 mere sensation ! Even in the noblest organs of sense it is nothing more 

 than a local and specific feeling, susceptible within its kind of a few 

 variations, but always strictly subjective and containing in itself noth- 

 ing objective, nothing resembling a perception. For sensation of every 

 sort is and remains a process in the organism itself. As such it is limited 

 to the territory inside the skin and can never, accordingly, per se con- 

 tain anything that lies outside the skin or outside ourselves. . . . Onlv 

 when the Understanding ... is roused to activity and brings its 

 sole and only form, the law of Cmisality, into play, only then does the 

 mighty transformation take place which makes out of subjective sensa- 

 tion objective intuition. The Understanding, namely, grasps by means 

 of its innate, a priori, ante-experiential form, the given sensation of the 

 body as an effect which as such must necessarily have a cause. At the 

 same time the Understanding summons to its aid the form of the outer 

 sense which similarly lies already preformed in the intellect (or brain), 

 and which is Space, in order to locate that cause outside of the organ- 

 ism. . . . In this process the Understanding, as I shall soon show, takes 

 note of the most minute peculiarities of the given sensation in order to 

 construct in the outer space a cause which shall completely account for 

 them. This operation of the Understanding is, however, not one that 

 takes place discursively, reflectively, in ahstracto, by means of words 

 and concepts ; but is intuitive and immediate. . . . Thus the Under- 

 standing must first create the objective world ; never can the latter, 

 already complete in se, simply promenade into our heads through the 

 senses and organic apertures. For the senses yield us nothing further 

 than the raw material which must be first elaborated into the objective 

 conception of an orderly physical world-system by means of the afore- 

 said simple forms of Space, Time, and Causality. ... Let me show the 



