The words ‘in time’ would seem to show that what is referred to is reality in the realm of appearance, the realitas phaenomenon of the Anticipations. But immediately below we find the following sentence:
“As time is only the form of intuition, and consequently of objects as appearances, what corresponds in them to sensation is the transcendental matter of all objects as things in themselves, thinghood [Sachheit], reality.”[1151]
The teaching of the first sentence is phenomenalist; that of the other is subjectivist.
Now in the section on Anticipations of Perception the phenomenalist tendencies of Kant’s thought are decidedly the more prominent. The implied distinction is threefold, between sensation as subjective state possessing intensive magnitude, spatial realities that possess both intensive and extensive magnitude, and the thing in itself. Objects as appearances are regarded as causes of sensation and as producing changes in one another.
The explanation of the phenomenalist character of this section is not far to seek. Kant’s chief purpose in it, as we shall find, is to develop the dynamical theory of matter to which he had long held, and which, as he was convinced, would ultimately be substituted for the mechanistic view to which almost all physicists then adhered. We can easily understand how in this endeavour the realist tendencies of his thinking should at once come to the surface, and why he should have been constrained to develop a position more precise and less ambiguous than that expressed in the definitions of reality and degree given in the chapter on Schematism. With these preliminary explanations we may pass to Kant’s second proof of his principle.
A link of connection between the two proofs may be found in the reason which Kant in the first proof gives for his assertion that sensation cannot possess extensive magnitude—the reason, namely, that as its apprehension takes place in a single moment, it involves no element of synthesis. In his second proof Kant modifies this contention, and maintains that we can abstract from the extensive magnitude of the appearance, and yet can recognise a synthesis as being involved.
“The real which corresponds to sensations in general, as opposed to negation = 0, represents only something the very conception of which contains an existence [ein Sein], and signifies nothing but the synthesis in an empirical consciousness in general.”[1152]
Kant adds that in a single moment we can represent to ourselves as involved in the bare sensation