Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - Kant's Conception of the Leibniz Space and Time Doctrine (The Philosophical Review, 1897-07-01).pdf/5

Rh Negatively, therefore, it has been shown that Leibniz does not hold the doctrine of space and time as abstractions from real, side-by-side substances. For, in the first place, whatever expressions may be so interpreted are clearly contradicted by the whole tenor of his teaching, and by his detailed discussions; and, further, all these expressions refer to extension and to duration, which Leibniz explicitly distinguishes from space and time.

The positive doctrine of Leibniz is most frequently summarized in the statement common to the Nouveaux Essais and to the correspondence with Clarke, that space is the order of the coexistent, and time the order of the successive. This expression must be scrutinized more closely. It has been interpreted by Kant, and by others, to mean that the order (that is, the space) of things, and the order (that is, the time) of events, is secondary to the things and the events themselves,—real only in so far as they are real, as if things and events first existed and then were ordered. Now Leibniz is at pains to guard himself against this inference. In the first place he repeatedly declares that space and time are eternal truths, “founded on God, like all eternal truths.” “Time and space,” he says simply, in another chapter, “are of the nature of eternal truths.”’ It is to be noticed that these statements closely codrdinate the eternal truths space and time, not only with what Leibniz calls vérités de vaison, but more specifically with innate ideas, that is, as he defines them, habits or ways of being conscious (penchants a reconnottre, or habitudes naturelles). It follows, of course, that Leibniz unequivocally asserts the necessity of geometrical truths, classing them, however, among innate ideas. The premises of Kant’s transcendental deduction are fully accepted in the Nouveaux Essats.