Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - Kant's Conception of the Leibniz Space and Time Doctrine (The Philosophical Review, 1897-07-01).pdf/7

Rh is a relation (rapport), an order, not merely between existing things (les existans), but also between possible things,” is one of the many definite expressions of the Nouveaux Essais A parallel statement is the following: “Space, like time, is a certain order which does not merely embrace (complectitur) actual things (actualia), but also possible things.” The meaning is evident: actual things are perceived things, and space and time are said to exist independent of any actual existences, that is, space and time are more than the perceived relations of things. “Space,” he says, “without things in it (pris sans les choses) is undetermined and not even actual”; and, were things annihilated, “there would be no times nor places (ni temps ni lieux), but time and space would exist in God’s ideas as simple possibilities.’ In fact, therefore, space and time become independent of things (hors de choses), and are orderings of God’s mind, though they may be orders of things as well. They are undetermined without things, but they are even less dependent on things than Kant’s categories are dependent on the manifold of sense, because applied only to this manifold. In a word, space and time are subjective, ordering principles of the divine mind.

Kant’s criticism of Leibniz may be found in the Dissertation, the Kritik, the Prolegomena, and in those manuscript notes on the margins of Kant’s private copy of the Kritik and of his metaphysical text-books, which Erdmann has collected under the titles Nachträge and Reflexionen. The main points of this criticism have already been suggested. In the first place, Kant ranks Leibniz with Newton, as holding to the extra-mental reality of space and time. Leibniz is distinguished from Newton on the ground of his teaching that space, though real, is an ‘abstract real,’ that is, not a substance, but rather the quality of a substance. This statement occurs twice in the Dissertation,—first, in section, where Kant mentions