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 SPACE AND TIME INTUITIONS A PRIORI. 341 result continues in an altered form even among contem- porary thinkers — as a discussion whether the " main pur- pose " of Criticism is to be found in the limitation of knowledge to possible experience, or the establishment of a priori elements — though many, in adherence to Kant's own view, maintain that the metaphysics of knowledge and of phenomena (immanent rationalism) is the only legitimate metaphysics. V I. Theory of Knowledge. (a) The Pure lutuitions (Transcendental iEsthetic). — The first part of the Critique of Reason, the Transcendental ^Esthetic, lays down the position that space and time diXt not independent existences, not real beings, and not properties or relations which would belong to things in themselves though they were not intuited, but forms of our intuition. I which have their basis in the subjective constitution of our, the human, mind. If we separate from sensuous intui- tion all that the understanding thinks in it through its concepts, and all that belongs to sensation, these two forms of intuition remain, which may be termed mixe intuitions, since they can be considered apart from all sens"ation7~ As su.bjective conditions (lying in the nature of the subject) ifthrough which alone a thing can become an object of intuit [tTorf for us, they precede all em pi r ical i n tuitions or .a re a 'p'rtoru Space and time are neither substantial receptacles which contain all that is real nor orders inhering in things in them- selves, tmiXonns^-Ol-i^u-i^en. Now all our representations are either pure or empirical in their ori^n, and either intuitive or conceptual in character. Kant advanc es f our proofs for the position that sp a ce and time are n ot empirical and not concept s, but pure intuitions : (i) Tinne is not an empirical concept which has been abstracted from experience. For the coexistence or succession of phenomena, i. e., their existence at the same time or at different times (from which, as many believe, the representation of time is abstracted), itself presupposes time — a coexistence or succession is possible