His system can be compared to a garden, somewhat formal perhaps, but with the charm of a quality more than intellectual, a besonnenheit, an exquisite moderation over all. And from the ground he so carefully prepared with that buried in obscurity, which it is fitting should be obscure, science blossoms and the tree of real knowledge grows.
The critique is a storehouse of ideas of profound interest. The one of which I have given a partial statement leads, as we shall see on studying it in detail, to a theory of mathematics suggestive of enquiries in many directions.
The justification for my treatment will be found amongst other passages in that part of the transcendental analytic, in which Kant speaks of objects of experience subject to the forms of sensibility, not subject to the concepts of reason.
Kant asserts that whenever we think we think of objects in space and time, but he denies that the space and time exist as independent entities. He goes about to explain them, and their universality, not by assuming them, as most other philosophers do, but by postulating their absence. How then does it come to pass that the world is in space and time to us?
Kant takes the same position with regard to what we call nature—a great system subject to law and order. “How do you explain the law and order in nature?” we ask the philosophers. All except Kant reply by assuming law and order somewhere, and then showing how we can recognise it.
In explaining our notions, philosophers from other than the Kantian standpoint, assume the notions as existing outside us, and then it is no difficult task to show how they come to us, either by inspiration or by observation.
We ask “Why do we have an idea of law in nature?” “Because natural processes go according to law,” we are answered, “and experience inherited or acquired, gives us this notion.”
But when we speak about the law in nature we are speaking about a notion of our own. So all that these expositors do is to explain our notion by an assumption of it.
Kant is very different. He supposes nothing. An experience such as ours is very different from experience in the abstract. Imagine just simply experience, succession of states, of consciousness! Why, there would be no connecting any two together, there would be no personal identity, no memory. It is out of a general experience such as this, which, in respect to anything we call real, is less than a dream, that Kant shows the genesis of an experience such as ours.
Kant takes up the problem of the explanation of space, time, order, and so quite logically does not presuppose them.