The grounds for the former assertion are not here considered, and that is doubtless the reason why the _oder nicht_ is excised in Kant’s private copy of the _Critique_. As we have seen, Kant does not anywhere in the _Aesthetic_ even attempt to offer argument in support of this assertion. In defence of (_a_) Kant propounds for the first time the view of sensibility as a limitation. Space is a limiting condition to which human intuition is subject. Whether the intuitions of other thinking beings are subject to the same limitation, we have no means of deciding. But for all human beings, Kant implies, the same conditions must hold universally.[477] In the phrase “transcendental ideality of space”[478] Kant, it may be noted, takes the term ideality as signifying subjectivity, and the term transcendental as equivalent to transcendent. He is stating that judged from a _transcendent_ point of view, _i.e._ from the point of view of the thing in itself, space has a merely subjective or “empirical” reality. This is an instance of Kant’s careless use of the term transcendental. Space is empirically real, but taken _transcendently_, is merely ideal.[479] KANT’S ATTITUDE TO THE PROBLEMS OF MODERN GEOMETRY This is an appropriate point at which to consider the consistency of Kant’s teaching with modern developments in geometry. Kant’s attitude has very frequently been misrepresented. As he here states, he is willing to recognise that the forms of intuition possessed by other races of finite beings may not coincide with those of the human species. But in so doing he does not mean to assert the possibility of other _spatial_ forms, _i.e._ of spaces that are non-Euclidean. In his pre-Critical period Kant had indeed attempted to deduce the three-dimensional character of space as a consequence of the law of gravitation; and recognising that that law is in itself arbitrary, he concluded that God might, by establishing different relations of gravitation, have given rise to spaces of different properties and dimensions. “A science of all these possible kinds of space would undoubtedly be the highest enterprise which a finite understanding could undertake in the field of geometry.”[480]