[945] i. p. 339: “Each pulse of cognitive consciousness, each Thought, dies away and is replaced by another.... Each later Thought, knowing and including thus the Thoughts which went before, is the final receptacle—and appropriating them is the final owner—of all that they contain and own. Each Thought is thus born an owner, and dies owned, transmitting whatever it realized as its Self to its own later proprietor. As Kant says [cf. below, pp. 461-2], it is as if elastic balls were to have not only motion but knowledge of it, and a first ball were to transmit both its motion and its consciousness to a second, which took both up into its consciousness and passed them to a third, until the last ball held all that the other balls had held, and realized it as its own.”
[946] I here use “objective” in its modern meaning: I am not concerned with the special meaning which Descartes himself attached to the terms objective and formaliter.
[947] Pp. 277-8.
[948] On this whole matter cf. above, p. xlv; below, pp. 312-21 on Kant’s Refutation of Idealism; pp. 373-4 on the Second Analogy; pp. 407 ff., 414 ff. on Phenomena and Noumena; p. 461 ff. on the Paralogisms; and p. 546. Cf. also A 277-8 = B 334.
[949] P. 267 ff.
[950] Though the posthumously published work of Kant’s old age, his Transition from the Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science to Physics, bears the marks of weakening powers, and is much too incomplete and obscure to allow of any very assured deductions from its teaching, it is none the less significant that it is largely occupied in attempting to define the relation in which the objective world of physical science stands to the sensible world of ordinary consciousness. As above noted (p. 275 n.), it is there asserted in at least twenty-six distinct passages that sensations are due to the action of “the moving forces of matter” upon the sense-organs. What is even more significant is the adoption and frequent occurrence (Altpreussische Monatsschrift (1882), pp. 236, 287, 289, 290, 292, 294, 295-6, 300, 308, 429, 436, 439) of the phrase “Erscheinung von der Erscheinung.” Kant would seem to mean by “Erscheinung vom ersten Range” (op. cit. p. 436) (i.e. appearance as such), the objective world as determined by physical science; and by “Erscheinung vom zweiten Range” (i.e. appearance of the appearance), this same objective world as known in terms of the sensations which material bodies generate by acting on the sense-organs. Kant adds that the former is known directly, and the latter indirectly—meaning, apparently, that the former is known through a priori forms native to the understanding, and the latter only in terms of sense-data which are mechanically conditioned (cf. loc. cit. pp. 286, 292, and 444 n. The terms latter and former on p. 300 have got transposed).
[951] Cf. below pp. 312-21, 373-4, 414 ff., 425 ff., 558 ff.
[952] B 129.
[953] B 161 n.
[954] B 130-1.