Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/141

 the title : "Third Analogy of Experience." Here Kant goes so far as to say that "the co-existence of phenomena, which exercise no reciprocal action on one another, but are separated by a perfectly empty space, could never become an object of possible perception" (which, by the way, would be a proof a priori that there is no empty space between the fixed stars), and that "the light which plays between our eyes and celestial bodies"—an expression conveying surreptitiously the thought, that this starlight not only acts upon our eyes, but is acted upon by them also—"produces an intercommunity between us and them, and proves the co-existence of the latter." Now, even empirically, this last assertion is false ; since the sight of a fixed star by no means proves its coexistence simultaneously with its spectator, but, at most, its existence some years, nay even some centuries before. Besides, this second Kantian theory stands and falls with the first, only it is far more easily detected ; and the nullity of the whole conception of reciprocity has been shown in § 20.

The arguments I have brought forward against Kant's proof may be compared with two previous attacks made on it by Feder, and by G. E. Schulze.

Not without considerable hesitation did I thus venture (in 1813) to attack a theory which had been universally received as a demonstrated truth, is repeated even now in the latest publications, and forms a chief point in the doctrine of one for whose profound wisdom I have the greatest reverence and admiration ; one to whom, indeed, I owe so