Page:Immanuel Kant - Dreams of a Spirit-Seer - tr. Emanuel Fedor Goerwitz (1900).djvu/88

 70 time by a line, although time and space have comformity only by relation and therefore agree, indeed, according to analogy, but never according to quality. This is the reason why the idea of divine eternity assumes even with philosophers the appearance of infinite time, be they never so careful not to mix them up; and one great cause why mathematicians are generally loath to admit the monads of Leibnitz may be that they cannot help but imagine these monads as little masses. Thus it is not improbable that spiritual sensations can pass over into consciousness if they act upon correlated ideas of the senses. In such a way ideas which are communicated by spiritual influx, would clothe themselves with the signs of that language which man uses for his other purposes. Thus the sensation of the presence of a spirit becomes converted into the picture of the human figure; the order and beauty of the immaterial world into fantasies which, under other circumstances, give pleasure to our senses in this life, &c.

Nevertheless this kind of apparition cannot be a common and ordinary thing but can occur only with persons whose organs have an unusual sensitiveness for intensifying, by harmonious motion, according to the inner state of the soul, the pictures of the imagination, to