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16 of an object as sensibly real thus involves a synthetic activity of the mind, and the consciousness of this synthetic activity is intensive quantity or degree.

Passing now to the other side of the problem, Kant proceeds to show that reality as it actually is cannot possibly be known by a being like man, who in all the processes of his knowledge is compelled to represent objects as quanta. This conclusion will be seen to follow almost directly from what has already been said. If we must present objects to ourselves as extensive or intensive quanta, we can never come directly into the presence of individual reality, since no quantum can possibly be a true individual. Thus Kant proceeds to urge the claims of thought in such a way as to bring out the limits of our perceptive experience. He maintains, in the first place, that we cannot possibly have experience of the world of sensible objects either as absolutely limited, or as absolutely unlimited, in time or space. From the very nature of the synthetic process in which objects are presented as quanta, there can be no limit to their extensibility or their divisibility. A first moment of time, or a last point of space, is an impossible experience ; and equally impossible is an indivisible part of space or of matter. The very conditions of our sensible experience preclude us from a knowledge of reality as we are compelled to think it. Yet reason makes us aware that, without such knowledge, we have not attained to the apprehension of reality as it truly is, and hence we cannot avoid the conclusion that our knowledge is not of reality as it is in itself, but only of reality as it presents itself to us under the necessary limitations of our faculties. Like Socrates we know what reality must be, but we also know that we do not know it. Yet this very consciousness of the limitation of our sensible experience sets before our minds the idea of reality as it is in itself. We cannot, it is true, by any exercise of our intellectual faculties, pass beyond flammantia mania which shut us in, but we may none the less be able to have a reasoned faith in the existence of supersensible realities corresponding to our ideas. The world of sense is a dizzy Bacchic dance, in which no single point remains for a moment