Thus it appears the mode of illustration which we have used is not an
artificial one. There really exists in nature a duality of the kind
which is necessary to explain the origin of order out of no order—the
duality, namely, of dimension and position. Let us use the term group
for that system of points which remains unchanged, whatever arbitrary
change of its constituents takes place. We notice that a group involves
a duality, is inconceivable without a duality.
Thus, according to Kant, the primary element of experience is the
group, and the theory of groups would be the most fundamental branch
of science. Owing to an expression in the critique the authority of
Kant is sometimes adduced against the assumption of more than three
dimensions to space. It seems to me, however, that the whole tendency
of his theory lies in the opposite direction, and points to a perfect
duality between dimension and position in a dimension.
If the order and the law we see is due to the conditions of conscious
experience, we must conceive nature as spontaneous, free, subject to no
predication that we can devise, but, however apprehended, subject to
our logic.
And our logic is simply spatiality in the general sense—that resultant
of a selection of the permanent from the unpermanent, the ordered from
the unordered, by the means of the group and its underlying duality.
We can predicate nothing about nature, only about the way in which
we can apprehend nature. All that we can say is that all that which
experience gives us will be conditioned as spatial, subject to our
logic. Thus, in exploring the facts of geometry from the simplest
logical relations to the properties of space of any number of
dimensions, we are merely observing ourselves, becoming aware of the
conditions under which we must perceive. Do any phenomena present
themselves incapable of explanation under the assumption of the space
we are dealing with, then we must habituate ourselves to the conception
of a higher space, in order that our logic may be equal to the task
before us.
We gain a repetition of the thought that came before, experimentally
suggested. If the laws of the intellectual comprehension of nature are
those derived from considering her as absolute chance, subject to no
law save that derived from a process of selection, then, perhaps, the
order of nature requires different faculties from the intellectual to
apprehend it. The source and origin of ideas may have to be sought
elsewhere than in reasoning.
The total outcome of the critique is to leave the ordinary man just
where he is, justified in his practical attitude towards nature,
liberated from the fetters of his own mental representations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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