Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - Kant's Conception of the Leibniz Space and Time Doctrine (The Philosophical Review, 1897-07-01).pdf/13

Rh argument of the Aesthetik to the “idea (Vorstellung) of space borrowed through experience from the relation of phenomena”’; for here the word does not reappear in the parallel argument concerning time. It is hardly possible, however, to dispose of all such statements in the same way. A passage of the Erläuterung shows this clearly. Immediately after the reference to those who hold that space and time are “confusedly perceived (vorgestellte) relations of phenomena,” Newton and his school are twitted with their inability, because of the troublesome doctrine of the external reality of space and time, to deal with the higher objects of understanding,—evidently God, freedom, and immortality. The opposing school, it is said, does not meet this difficulty, a statement which can only mean that the Leibnizians are not supposed to teach the external reality of space and time.

Undeniably, then, Kant does sometimes suppose Leibniz to teach that space and time are relations of phenomena, as well as of things in themselves. The explanation of this contradiction is offered by a passage from the Amphiboly “Leibniz considered phenomena (nahm Erscheinungen) as things in themselves, and thus as, that is, objects of the pure understanding, although he endowed them with the name ‘phenomena’ on account of the confusedness of the consciousness of them (ihrer Vorstellungen).” The substance of this explanation may be given somewhat as follows: On Leibnizian principles the object of indistinct consciousness, or sense, is phenomenon, and the object of clear consciousness, or thought, is noumenon. The very Leibnizian definition of space, ‘confusedly apprehended relations of things-in-themselves,’ is then a contradiction in terms. Looked at from the point of view of the confusedness, space and time, whatever one call them, are really phenomenal; and it is in this way that they gain the advantage over the hopelessly fixed absolutes of the Newtonian theory. In other words, Kant declares that Leibniz really describes his related things-in-themselves as if they were