The following remarks may be useful in the way of explanation. In the
mind, all phenomena, as contents of a possible experience, must exist
in community (communio) of apperception or consciousness, and in so far
as it is requisite that objects be represented as coexistent and
connected, in so far must they reciprocally determine the position in
time of each other and thereby constitute a whole. If this subjective
community is to rest upon an objective basis, or to be applied to
substances as phenomena, the perception of one substance must render
possible the perception of another, and conversely. For otherwise
succession, which is always found in perceptions as apprehensions,
would be predicated of external objects, and their representation of
their coexistence be thus impossible. But this is a reciprocal
influence, that is to say, a real community (commercium) of substances,
without which therefore the empirical relation of coexistence would be
a notion beyond the reach of our minds. By virtue of this commercium,
phenomena, in so far as they are apart from, and nevertheless in
connection with each other, constitute a compositum reale. Such
composita are possible in many different ways. The three dynamical
relations then, from which all others spring, are those of inherence,
consequence, and composition.
These, then, are the three analogies of experience. They are nothing
more than principles of the determination of the existence of phenomena
in time, according to the three modi of this determination; to wit, the
relation to time itself as a quantity (the quantity of existence, that
is, duration), the relation in time as a series or succession, finally,
the relation in time as the complex of all existence (simultaneity).
This unity of determination in regard to time is thoroughly dynamical;
that is to say, time is not considered as that in which experience
determines immediately to every existence its position; for this is
impossible, inasmuch as absolute time is not an object of perception,
by means of which phenomena can be connected with each other. On the
contrary, the rule of the understanding, through which alone the
existence of phenomena can receive synthetical unity as regards
relations of time, determines for every phenomenon its position in
time, and consequently à priori, and with validity for all and every
time.