Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/371

 THINGS IN THEMSELVES, PHENOMENA. 349 time as well as all phenomena in them, bodies with their forces and motions, are in us," does not accurately express Kant's position, for he might justly reply that, according to him, bodies as phenomena are in different parts in space from that which we assign to ourselves, and thus without us ; that space is the form of external intuition, and through it external objects arise ior us from sensations; but that, in regard to the things in themselves which affect us, we are entirely ignorant whether they are within or without us. It can easily be shown by literal quotations that there were distinct tendencies in Kant, especially in the first edition of his principal work, toward a radical idealism which doubts or denies not merely the cognizability, but also the existence of objects external to the subject and its representations, and which degrades the thing in itself to a mere thought in us, or completely does away with it {e.g.., " The representation of an object as a thing in general is not only insufficient, but,. . . independently of empir- ical conditions, in itself contradictory "). But these expres- sions indicate only a momentary inclination toward such a view, not a binding avowal of it, and they are outweighed by those in which idealism is more or less energetically rejected. That which according to Kant exists outside the representation of the individual is twofold : (i) the unknown things in themselves with their problematical char- acteristics, as the ground of phenomena ; (2) the phenom- ena "themselves" with their knowable immanent laws, and their relations in space and time, as possible represen- tations. When I turn my glance away from the rose its redness vanishes, since this predicate belongs to it only in so far and so long as it acts in the light on my visual appa- ratus. What, then, is left? That thing in itself, of course, . which, when it appears to me, calls forth in me the intuition^ of the rose. But there is still something else remaining — the phenomenon of the rose, with its size, its form, and its motion in the wind. For these are predicates which must be attributed to the phenomenon itself as the object of my representation. If the rose, as determined in space and time, vanished when I turned my head away, it could not.