Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - Kant's Conception of the Leibniz Space and Time Doctrine (The Philosophical Review, 1897-07-01).pdf/9

Rh Now it has been shown already that Leibniz does not treat space and time as either composites or relations of things in themselves. Kant’s misunderstanding is only to be explained by the reflection that he knows only, or mainly, the corrupt Wolffian form of the Leibniz doctrine, which teaches that extended matter and composite bodies are made up of monads lying, as it were, side by side. The reference in the passage already quoted from the Prolegomena to “true space in the object” as consisting “of simple parts” evidently rests on such a conception. A passage from the Amphiboly more definitely relates the space and time theory to the monad doctrine. “Leibniz,” Kant says, “assumed monads, and within them an activity of consciousness (Vorstellungskraft). … Space and time, therefore, were possible, the former through the relation of the substances, the latter through the connection of the determinations (Verknüpfung der Bestimmungen).” Now this, as has been said, though opposed to the whole trend of Leibniz’s thought, is the precise form of the Wolffian doctrine. “Bodies are only aggregates of monads,” Wolff himself says; and in Baumgarten’s Metaphysek which Kant used for years as text-book, occurs not only the statement, “every aggregate of monads is extended,” but the assertion that the parts of which bodies are composed are monads. Kant’s conception of the Leibniz space doctrine was doubtless affected also, especially in the form in which it appears in the Dissertation, by a misinterpretation of Leibniz’s repeated assertions,—that space is an order of things. Influenced by the realistic interpretation of the monad doctrine, Kant evidently supposed thing (chose) to mean extra-mental object, element, or monad. On this view the only difference between Newton and Leibniz might indeed be expressed by the statement that the first conceived space as an absolute, substantial, extra-mental reality; the second, as an abstract, that is, attribute reality.