CHAPTER IV.
ON THE FIRST CLASS OF OBJECTS FOR THE SUBJECT, AND THAT FORM OF THE PRINCIPLE OF SUFFICIENT REASON WHICH PREDOMINATES IN IT.
§ 17. General Account of this Class of Objects.
The first class of objects possible to our representative faculty, is that of intuitive, complete, empirical representations. They are intuitive as opposed to mere thoughts, i.e. abstract conceptions; they are complete, inasmuch as, according to Kant's distinction, they not only contain the formal, but also the material part of phenomena; and they are empirical, partly as proceeding, not from a mere connection of thoughts, but from an excitation of feeling in our sensitive organism, as their origin, to which they constantly refer for evidence as to their reality: partly also because they are linked together, according to the united laws of Space, Time and Causality, in that complex without beginning or end which forms our Empirical Reality. As, nevertheless, according to the result of Kant's teaching, this Empirical Reality does not annul their Transcendental Ideality, we shall consider them here, where we have only to do with the formal elements of knowledge, merely as representations.
§ 18. Outline of a Transcendental Analysis of Empirical Reality.
The forms of these representations are those of the inner and outer sense; namely, Time and Space. But these are only perceptible when filled. Their perceptibility is Matter, to which I shall return further on, and again in § 21. If Time were the only form of these representations, there could be no coexistence, therefore nothing permanent and no duration. For Time is only perceived when filled, and its course is only perceived by the changes which take place in that which fills it. The permanence of an object is therefore only recognized by contrast with the changes going on in other objects coexistent with it. But the representation of coexistence is impossible in Time alone; it depends, for its completion, upon the representation of Space; because, in mere Time, all things follow one another, and in mere Space all things are side by side; it is accordingly only by the combination of Time and Space that the representation of coexistence arises.
On the other hand, were Space the sole form of this class of representations, there would be no change; for change or alteration is succession of states, and succession is only possible in Time. We may therefore define Time as the possibility of opposite states in one and the same thing.
Thus we see, that although infinite divisibility and infinite extension are common to both Time and Space, these two forms of empirical representations differ fundamentally, inasmuch as what is essential to the one is without any meaning at all for the other: juxtaposition having no meaning in Time, succession no meaning in Space. The empirical representations which belong to the orderly complex of reality, appear notwithstanding in both forms together; nay, the intimate union of both is the condition of reality which, in a sense, grows out of them, as a product grows out of its factors. Now it is the Understanding which, by means of its own peculiar function, brings about this union and connects these heterogeneous forms in such a manner, that empirical reality—albeit only for that Understanding—arises out of their mutual interpenetration, and arises as a collective representation, forming a complex, held together by the forms of the principle of sufficient reason, but whose limits are problematical. Each single representation belonging to this class is a part of this complex, each one taking its place in it according to laws known to us à priori; in it therefore countless objects coexist, because Substance, i.e. Matter, remains permanent in spite of the ceaseless flow of Time, and because its states change in spite of the rigid immobility of Space. In this complex, in short, the whole objective, real world exists for us. The reader who may be interested in this, will find the present rough sketch of the analysis of empirical reality further worked out in § 4 of the first volume of "Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,"[55] where a closer explanation is given of the way in which the Understanding effects this union and thus creates for itself the empirical world. He will also find a very important help in the table, "Prædicabilia à priori of Time, Space, and Matter," which is added to the fourth chapter of the second volume of the same work, and which I recommend to his attention, as it especially shows how the contrasts of Time and Space are equally balanced in Matter, as their product, under the form of Causality.
We shall now proceed to give a detailed exposition of that function of the Understanding which is the basis of empirical reality; only we must first, by a few incidental explanations, remove the more immediate objections which the fundamental idealism of the view I have adopted might encounter.