Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - Kant's Conception of the Leibniz Space and Time Doctrine (The Philosophical Review, 1897-07-01).pdf/8

№ &#93; “those English philosophers who assert the objective reality of time, or, as it were,a certain stream (flurum) … continuous and apart from any existing things; or those like Leibniz and his disciples, who hold that time is, as it were, a reality abstracted from a succession of internal states (adstractum reale a successtone statuum tnternorum).” And in the following section “those who hold that space is not anything objective and real, but that it is subjective and ideal” are contrasted with those who “defend the reality of space,’ while among these, “the men who regard space as an absolute and immense reservoir (receptaculum)” are distinguished from those who contend that space is “a relation of existing things which would wholly vanish if the things were taken away.”

Though Leibniz is not named in the Prolegomena, Kant evidently refers to him by the allusion to “mathematicians who were at the same time philosophers.” Leibniz is there supposed to teach that “a line in nature might well consist of physical points, so that true space in the object would be made up of simple parts.” A little further on this is characterized as the theory that space is a “quality of things in themselves (eine Beschaffenheit der Dinge-an-sich selbst)” The same criticism is made in the Aesthetik. Again Newton and Leibniz are not named, but are clearly contrasted as “mathematical investigators (Natusforscher)” and “metaphysical teachers (Naturlehrer).” These latter, Leibniz and the Wolffians, are opposed to the mathematicians, for whom space and time are two eternal and endless nothings (Undinge). To Leibniz on the other hand, Kant says, space and time are “relations” abstracted from experience, though indistinctly imagined (verworren vorgestellte). This, Kant adds, is to admit the absolute reality of space and time, but inherent (inhärirend), not substantial (subsistirend), reality. The Amphiboly, made up as it is, for the most part, of criticism on Leibniz, contains a similar comment, ending with the words: “So space and time become (to him) the intelligible form of the relation of things in themselves.”