Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/484

468 note, there are half a dozen notes, of which the chief has its character specialized by the others. In the second place, each of these notes, consisting objectively of a rapid series of aerial waves, produces subjectively a rapid series of impressions on the auditory nerve. Either by Savart's machine or by the siren, it is proved to demonstration that every musical sound is the product of successive units of sound, each in itself unmusical, which, as they succeed one another with increasing rapidity, produce a tone which progressively rises in pitch. Here again, then, under an apparent simplicity there is a double complexity.

Most of these examples of the illusiveness of unaided perception, whether exercised upon objective or subjective existences, were unknown to Kant. Had they been known to him they might have suggested other views concerning certain of our states of consciousness, and might have given a different character to his philosophy. Let us observe what would possibly have been the changes in two of his cardinal conceptions—metaphysical and ethical.

Our consciousness of Time and Space appeared to him, as they appear to every one, perfectly simple; and the apparent simplicity he accepted as actual simplicity. Had he suspected that, just as the seemingly homogeneous and undecomposable consciousness of Sound really consists of multitudinous units of consciousness, so might the apparently homogeneous and undecomposable consciousness of Space, he would possibly have been led to inquire whether the consciousness of Space is not wholly composed of infinitely numerous relations of position, such as those which every portion of it presents. And finding that every portion of Space, immense or minute, can not be either known or conceived save in some relative position to the conscious subject, and that, besides involving the relations of distance and direction, it invariably contains within itself relations of right and left, top and bottom, nearer and further; he might perhaps have concluded that our consciousness of that matrix of phenomena we call Space, has been built up in the course of Evolution by accumulated experiences registered in the nervous system. And had he concluded this, he would not have committed himself to the many absurdities which his doctrine involves.

Similarly, if, instead of assuming that conscience is simple because it seems simple to careless introspection, he had entertained the hypothesis that it is perhaps complex—a consolidated product of multitudinous experiences received mainly by ancestors and added to by self—he might have arrived at a consistent system of Ethics. That the habitual association of pains with certain