Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/37

Rh of a quantum to be infinitely divisible and infinitely addible. This peculiarity, according to Kant, arises from the nature of space and time, neither of which, being continuous, admits of being summed up and completed; and, as no object can be known except under the forms of space and time, Kant naturally concludes that the real lies beyond our knowledge. Now, it may be shown that the true inference from the impossibility of attaining completeness by determining objects as spatial and temporal is, not that knowledge is limited to such objects, but, on the contrary, that it is not so limited. Why is the effort to find a true individual by summing up space or time necessarily abortive, if not that the mind refuses to be satisfied with that which is no real unity? It is the tacit conception of the world as complete that makes us aware of the inadequacy of all our efforts to determine it as a mere externality of parts or a flux of moments. Had we no higher conception of existence, we should never be conscious of the inadequacy of our conception of it as an extensive quantum. Thus in the consciousness of objects as in space and time we are already beyond that consciousness; and we have only to make this higher consciousness explicit to be aware that we are beyond it. As a matter of fact, no one is satisfied simply to know the relative position or magnitude of an object, or the mere place of an event in the flux of time: we begin with such knowledge, but we go on to inquire into its less obvious nature — its causal relations, its development, its meaning for human life. The impossibility, therefore, of resting in the mere knowledge of coexistences and successions arises from the consciousness that we can only know reality in its completeness by abandoning the monotonous repetition of space on space, time on time, quantum on quantum, and seeking for a more fundamental mode of comprehending it. Yet, it must not be forgotten that even the determination of objects as spatial and temporal quanta is a step in the ascent towards a full view of reality. The mathematical determination of objects as magnitudes prepares the way for the knowledge of them as connected by the bonds of causality. Hence all the physical sciences rest upon the mathematical; or, in other