Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - Kant's Conception of the Leibniz Space and Time Doctrine (The Philosophical Review, 1897-07-01).pdf/11

Rh the Leibniz concepts of space and time as “mere creations of imagination”; and in the Prolegomena, as “simply self-made fictions of the brain (Altrngespenste), to which no object corresponds,—at least adequately.” Against this theory, Kant upholds the a priori nature of the space and time consciousness.

There is an interesting modification of the external-reality theory which Kant attributes to Leibniz, and which, indeed, persists in the traditional reading of the Leibnizian space doctrine. This is the teaching that space and time are truly relations of things in themselves, but relations confusedly and indistinctly apprehended. “He assumes,” Kant says of Leibniz, at the end of a passage already quoted from the Amphiboly, “that we perceive things as they are in themselves, but with confused consciousness (mit verworrener Vorstellung).” Space and time are called “confusedly imaged (vorgestellte) relations,” confused objects of consciousness (Vorstellungen).” A marginal note denies that space and time “consist in this, that we are confusedly conscious of real relations,” and a passage in section 8 of the Aesthetik plainly declares that “the system of Leibniz concerning space and time was to change both into intellectual but confused concepts.”

Now it is obvious that such a doctrine is in strict harmony with Leibniz’s fundamental law of continuity. He unquestionably teaches the unity of sense and thought as mere degrees of confused and distinct consciousness, so that he could consistently assert the sense perception—that is, the confused knowledge—of things in themselves and their relations, as well as of phenomena, Such a theory, however, would really oppose the main current of his thought, for he is never very faithful to the unification of sense and understanding, virtually abandoning it when he makes his sharp contrast between the contingent vérités de fait and the necessary vérités de vaison. This necessity really separates thought from sense,