Oyonale - 3D art and graphic experiments
ThinkSpam
Click on the phrases to see them in context. The original texts by Immanuel Kant and David Hume are available from the Gutenberg Projet.
.
Transcendental idealism allows that the objects of external intuition--as intuited in space, and all changes in time--as represented by the internal sense, are real. Now, as everything real that occupies a space, contains a manifold the parts of which are external to each other, and is consequently composite--and a real composite, not of accidents (for these cannot exist external to each other apart from substance), but of substances--it follows that the simple must be a substantial composite, which is self-contradictory. As the pure intuition in all phenomena is either time or space, so is every phenomenon in its character of intuition an extensive quantity, inasmuch as it can only be cognized in our apprehension by successive synthesis (from part to part). The light dove cleaving in free flight the thin air, whose resistance it feels, might imagine that her movements would be far more free and rapid in airless space. It is, moreover, not necessary that we should limit the mode of intuition in space and time to the sensuous faculty of man. It would be unjust to accuse us of holding the long-decried theory of empirical idealism, which, while admitting the reality of space, denies, or at least doubts, the existence of bodies extended in it, and thus leaves us without a sufficient criterion of reality and illusion. Consequently, the representation of space cannot be borrowed from the relations of external phenomena through experience; but, on the contrary, this external experience is itself only possible through the said antecedent representation.