all possible experience; – this was an important, profound, and a late apperçu, which appeared in the form of the problem as to the possibility of synthetic judgments a priori, and has actually opened up the way to a deeper knowledge. This problem is the watchword of the Kantian philosophy, as the former proposition is that of the Cartesian, and shows (
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Kant very fitly places his investigations concerning time and space at the head of all the rest. For to the speculative mind these questions present themselves before all others: what is time? – what is this that consists of mere movement, without anything that moves it? – and what is space? this omnipresent nothing, out of which nothing that exists can escape without ceasing to be anything at all?
That time and space depend on the subject, are the mode in which the process of objective apperception is brought about in the brain, has already a sufficient proof in the absolute impossibility of thinking away time and space, while we can very easily think away everything that is presented in them. The hand can leave go of everything except itself. However, I wish here to illustrate by a few examples and deductions the more exact proofs of this truth which are given by Kant, not for the purpose of refuting stupid objections, but for the use of those who may have to expound Kant s doctrine in future.
"A right-angled equilateral triangle" contains no logical contradiction; for the predicates do not by any means cancel the subject, nor are they inconsistent with each other. It is only when their object is constructed in pure perception that the impossibility of their union in it appears. Now if on this account we were to regard this as a contradiction, then so would every physical impossibility, only discovered to be such after the lapse of centuries, be a contradiction; for example, the composition of a metal from its elements, or a mammal with
