Causation; Knowledge, Theory of; Philosophy, German; Reason
For the same reason, his view of the possible community of substances
could not represent it but as a predetermined harmony, and by no means
as a physical influence. For inasmuch as everything is occupied only
internally, that is, with its own representations, the state of the
representations of one substance could not stand in active and living
connection with that of another, but some third cause operating on all
without exception was necessary to make the different states correspond
with one another. And this did not happen by means of assistance
applied in each particular case (systema assistentiae), but through the
unity of the idea of a cause occupied and connected with all
substances, in which they necessarily receive, according to the
Leibnitzian school, their existence and permanence, consequently also
reciprocal correspondence, according to universal laws.
4th. This philosopher’s celebrated doctrine of space and time, in which
he intellectualized these forms of sensibility, originated in the same
delusion of transcendental reflection. If I attempt to represent by the
mere understanding, the external relations of things, I can do so only
by employing the conception of their reciprocal action, and if I wish
to connect one state of the same thing with another state, I must avail
myself of the notion of the order of cause and effect. And thus
Leibnitz regarded space as a certain order in the community of
substances, and time as the dynamical sequence of their states. That
which space and time possess proper to themselves and independent of
things, he ascribed to a necessary confusion in our conceptions of
them, whereby that which is a mere form of dynamical relations is held
to be a self-existent intuition, antecedent even to things themselves.
Thus space and time were the intelligible form of the connection of
things (substances and their states) in themselves. But things were
intelligible substances (substantiae noumena). At the same time, he
made these conceptions valid of phenomena, because he did not allow to
sensibility a peculiar mode of intuition, but sought all, even the
empirical representation of objects, in the understanding, and left to
sense naught but the despicable task of confusing and disarranging the
representations of the former.
But even if we could frame any synthetical proposition concerning
things in themselves by means of the pure understanding (which is
impossible), it could not apply to phenomena, which do not represent
things in themselves. In such a case I should be obliged in
transcendental reflection to compare my conceptions only under the
conditions of sensibility, and so space and time would not be
determinations of things in themselves, but of phenomena. What things
may be in themselves, I know not and need not know, because a thing is
never presented to me otherwise than as a phenomenon.
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