Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/245

 TIME AS RELATED TO CAUSALITY AND TO SPACE. 231 Space, clearly a construct of experience, and the elementary extension or spatialness from which this Total Space is built up. The other characteristic marks of the spatial clearly result from its greater generality, that is from the greater variety of its combinations with other sense experiences, for whereas the visual, like the tactual, quality, is always in our experience combined with the extended, this may be combined with either of the two. Thus, also, it is easier to abstract the spatial quality from the complex of sense-experiences, to shake it free from encumbrances, to make it the object of more constant attention. It follows naturally that space distinctions are more delicate and more complex. Finally, the certainty of the geometrical consciousness, on which is founded Kant's Transcendental Deduction of Space, is not to be explained by the ordinary assumption that space-con- sciousness, because different from sense, must have greater certainty, but on the ground that the spatial as a more constant object of attention is more universally appre- hended. It is interesting to observe that Kant, whose psychology is so often better than his metaphysics, possesses a truer insight into the nature of the spatial than he can force into the moulds of his philosophical preconceptions. With his distorted notion of the ultimate distinction between sense-quality and thought, he cannot include the spatial within the sense-manifold ; yet he keenly realises its character of immediateness, and can- not therefore treat space as a category, a principle of thought. Therefore that anomaly, the ' Form of Sense,' the ' sensible ' which has no sense-attributes, wins its permanent position in the Kantian hierarchy, because Kant could not blind him- self to the sense character of space. We are not here at all concerned with the specific con- troversy between nativist and empiricist. Whether the spatial is a combination of motor sense-element with visual or tactual, or whether it is itself a distinct sense-quality, matters little, so one realise what the appeal to the ordinary consciousness of everybody surely shows, that extension is ' sensible,' no less than colour or resistance. The spatial is then no fundamental category, or uniting principle, but itself one variety of the manifold to-be-categorised. This conclusion incidentally explains many of the absurdities of the theories about time. The tendency to treat the two after the same fashion has, as we have seen, long been rife in philosophy, and the efforts to make time, the category, follow the lead of extension, the sense-quality, or of Space, the notion elaborately built up from the sense-element, must