Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/470

 456 c. M. WALSH : KANT'S TBANSCENDENTAL (8) Empirical Idealism of Intuitions and Phenomena. That intuitions and phenomena are nothing in experience (i.e. have not objective reality). 1 The fifth is rejected because it is contrary to the first, the sixth because it is contrary to the second, and so on. The second and third virtually overlap, since the reality of things- in-themselves beyond experience and their unreality in ex- perience are mutually supplementary. Likewise the fifth and sixth may coincide, since the reality of phenomena beyond experience permits them to be things-in-themselves, while the reality of things-in-themselves in experience makes them into phenomena. The doctrines held and the doctrines rejected, then, each reduce to three. Kant himself used names for only three out of these six doctrines, and abbre- viated. He spoke of the first merely as Transcendental / Idealism, of the fourth as Empirical Eealism, and of the V eighth as Empirical Idealism, or simply Idealism. The question before us is : Did Kant prove the doctrines he held, and did he disprove the doctrines he rejected ? In the case of the fourth doctrine the question will be found to require investigation into the meaning of the doctrine itself. At the very outset it may without hesitation be said that the doctrine of the Transcendental Ideality of Time and Space as intuitions and of Sensible Objects as phenomena in them, is not successfully established. Here at once an objection is to be set aside which was urged by some of the early critics. This is that even though Kant proved the subjective character of our time and space (their empirical reality), he does not prove that there cannot be an objective time and space re- sembling them that there cannot be a transcendentally real time and space. The objection misses the mark because Kant attempts to prove, not merely the subjective character of our time and space, but their formativeness. Were time and space shown to be subjective merely as modes of the existence of our sense-objects and representations, there 1 It may be noticed that the combination " empirical idealism," in each division, makes a break in the symmetry of the arrangement. In fact, it is somewhat forced, since there is no empirical nothingness and what is experienced is real, so that a new meaning is involved for the term "ideality". The combination is included because it was actually em- ployed by Kant, even though, as we shall see, it was, in the last form, wrongly applied by him, the doctrine it denotes being ascribed to philo- sophers who did not entertain it. Kant sometimes called it (the eighth) " Material Idealism," which is a better term if it is confined to the denial of matter taken as any extended object outside us ; for in the sense of matter as consisting of extended things-in-themselves, it would be a denial of what Kant himself denied.