Page:Kant's Prolegomena etc (1883).djvu/273

 object we call matter in itself, or remained merely in the construction of our sense, a point which does not enter into the present question). Matter, in contradistinction to form, would be that which in external intuition, is an object of feeling, and consequently the properly empirical of sensible and outward intuition, because it cannot be given at all à priori In all experience something must be felt, and this is the real of sensuous intuition. In consequence, space, in which we are to institute experience respecting motions, must be capable of being felt, that is, of being indicated by that which can be felt, and this, as the sum-total of all objects of experience, and itself an object of the same, is called empirical space. Now this, as material, is itself movable; but a movable space, if its movement is to be able to be perceived, presupposes again an enlarged material space in which it is movable, and this again another, and so on to infinity.

Thus all motion that is an object of experience is merely relative; the space in which it is perceived is a relative space, which again moves itself perhaps in an opposite direction, in a space further enlarged, and therefore the matter moved in reference to the first may be termed at rest in relation to the second; and these alterations of the conception of motion go forward with the alteration of the relative space to infinity. To assume an absolute space, that is, one which, because it is not material, can be no object of experience as given fur itself, means assuming something which, neither in itself nor in its consequences (motion in absolute space), can be perceived, for the sake of the possibility of experience, which nevertheless must always exist without it. Absolute space is in itself nothing and no object at all, but signifies merely every other relative space that I can at any time conceive outside the given space, and that I can extend beyond each given space to infinity; one that includes the [given space], and in which I can assume it as moved. But since I have the enlarged, although still material, space only in thought, nothing is known to me of the matter indicating it. I abstract from this, and it is conceived, therefore, as a pure, non-empirical and absolute space, with which I can compare, and in which I