Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/29

13. It follows from this conception of reality that there are no real relations between the primitive monads, or, in other words, that real existence is made up of an infinite number of separate individuals, each of which contains within itself potentially all the phases which it displays. Now, this conception of reality had a strong influence upon Kant, an influence which makes itself felt through the whole of his subsequent speculations. To him, as to Leibnitz, the real is the individual, the self-complete. Where he differs mainly from Leibnitz is in denying that such reality can be an object of knowledge, and this he is led to do because he sees that the whole of the objects with which experience deals are determined spatially and temporally, and that when we abstract from space and time, we are in a region of mere ideas to which no definite object of knowledge corresponds. Kant was therefore unable to admit that we can by thought obtain an actual knowledge of individual realities. When we have emptied objects of their spatial and temporal relations, we have not attained to a knowledge of the real, but on the contrary we have entered into a world of abstractions. On the other hand, it is impossible to find among objects in space and time a true individual. Every object in space is infinitely divisible, and, beyond the remotest object that we may picture to the imagination, we can imagine others still more remote. Similarly, it is impossible to break up time into indivisible units, or to go back in imagination to a moment of time beyond which time was not. The true individual thus eludes us on both sides: it can neither be thought nor presented. It would therefore seem that we are for ever shut out from a vision of reality as it actually is. Thought demands completeness; perceptive experience cannot give it. Kant refuses to surrender his belief that the real is the individual or self-complete, and he is therefore compelled to throw the burden of inadequacy upon our perceptive experience. But, unless we maintain the universe to be a mere chaos, and our indestructible belief in reality a dream, we must attribute the imperfection of our ordinary knowledge to a peculiarity in our own faculty of perception. This is what Kant does. Space and time, he maintains, are forms, not of