The problem thus presented for solution is often, and usually with special reference to the Kantian treatment of space and time in the _Transcendental Æsthetic_, put in the form of the question whether space and time are subjective or objective. This is, however, at best a misleading and unfortunate mode of expression which we shall do well to avoid. The whole distinction between a subjective and an objective factor in experience loses most of its significance with the abolition, now effected by Psychology, of the vicious Kantian distinction between the “given” in perception and the “work of the mind.” When once we have recognised that the “given” itself is constituted by the movement of selective attention, it becomes impossible any longer to distinguish it as an objective factor in knowledge from the subjective structure subsequently raised upon it. Kant’s adherence to this false psychological antithesis so completely distorts his whole treatment of the “forms of intuition,” that it will be absolutely necessary in a brief discussion like our own to deal with the subject in entire independence of the doctrines of the _Æsthetic_, which unfortunately continue to exercise a disproportionate influence on the current metaphysical presentment of the problem.[141] It should scarcely be necessary to point out that the metaphysical questions have still less to do with the psychological problems, so prominent in recent science, of the precise way in which we come by our perception of extension and succession. For Metaphysics the sole question is one not of the origin but of the logical value of these ideas. It is of fundamental importance for the whole metaphysical treatment of the subject, to begin by distinguishing clearly between space and time as forms of _perception_, and space and time as _conceptual_ forms in which we construct our scientific notion of the physical order. One chief source of the confusions which beset the Kantian view is the neglect of Kant and most of his followers to make this distinction with sufficient clearness. We cannot insist too strongly upon the point that the space and the time of which we think in our science as containing the entire physical order, are not space and time as directly known to us in sense-perception, but are concepts elaborated out of the space and time of direct perception by a complicated process of synthesis and analysis, and involving abstraction from some of the most essential features of the space and time of actual experience. The following brief discussion may serve to illustrate the general nature of the relation between the two forms of space and time, and to exhibit the leading differences between them.