Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/42

Rh and I now suspect it is my scant and quite insufficient treatment of the peculiar nature of Space, as involved in my general doctrine, that is responsible for this frequent failure of readers to catch the objective character of the theory. In the system of Personal Idealism, of course. Space is the principle a priori whereby each conscious self that has the phase of intelligent being which we call experience, comes into actual sensuous commerce with other selves of that species, or, in short, shares with them in a real located and physical world. As such, it is discriminated from Time, the principle a priori that coördinates the private experiences of each self into a succession possibly necessary and predictable. Its nature, as thus a public principle in contrast to a private one, is in fact founded in the twofold aspect, self-referring and other-referring, essential to any individual self-consciousness; and the development of this doctrine of the origin of the space-consciousness, clearing up, as it would, the puzzle left over by Kant, — whether and why there are two elemental Sense-Forms, and no more, — would of course form a very important part of the systematic discussion of the new theory. In the first edition, however, the doctrine was merely referred to in passing; and even in the present edition I must content myself with barely touching upon it as I have now done, and directing the reader’s