Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - Kant's Conception of the Leibniz Space and Time Doctrine (The Philosophical Review, 1897-07-01).pdf/6

№ &#93; In another respect the Leibnizian doctrine of space and time shows an interesting correspondence with Kant’s teaching. Kant bases his doctrine of the subjectivity of space and time on the outcome of the antinomies, but Leibniz had already recognized the difficulty involved in the supposition that space and time are infinitely divisible. The point is not, he says, a part of space, nor the moment a part of time, and infinitesimals are mere mathematical abstractions: “{{lang|fr|les infiniment petits ne sont de mise que dans le calcul des géomètres.” Moreover, “a part of duration in which we observe no succession of ideas is merely a hypothesis of the vulgar mind.” So, also, Leibniz faces the dilemma of the infinite regress and the limited world, and pronounces against the reality of the boundary. ‘There never is a complete infinite ({{lang|fr|a tout imfini}})” he says; and in another place he declares that “one is deceived in supposing that he imagines an absolute space which is a complete infinite composed of parts. … This is a notion which implies a contradiction.” From the puzzling nature of time, finally, Leibniz reasons, just as Kant does, to its ideality. “Everything of time,” he says, “which exists, is successive, and so perishes continually; and how can a thing exist eternally which, to speak exactly, never exists? … Only instants of time exist, and the instant is not even a part of time. Therefore time could not be anything except ideal ({{lang|fr|le temps ne saurait être qu‘une chose idéelle}}); and the analogical relation of time and space will make us consider one as ideal as the other.”

Leibniz is even more specific. He does not content himself with vague statements that space and time are ideal and eternal: he definitely treats space and time as relations of God’s ideas. This doctrine is closely related with the rather obscure but reiterated assertions that space order and time order are not mere relations of actualities, but of possibilities.“ Space {{smallrefs}}