Hinton - The Fourth Dimension.pdf

APPLICATION TO KANT’S THEORY OF EXPERIENCE 109
The justification for my treatment will be found
amongst other passages in that part of the transcendental
analytic, in which Kant speaks of objects of experience
subject to the forms of sensibility, not subject to the
concepts of reason.
Kant asserts that whenever we think we think of
objects in space and time, but he denies that the space
and time exist as independent entities. He goes about
to explain them, and their universality, not be assuming
them, as most other philosophers do, but by postulating
their absence. How then does it come to pass that the
world is in space and time to us?
Kant takes the same position with regard to what we
call nature—a great system subject to law and order.
“How do you explain the law and order in nature?” we
ask the philosophers. All except Kant reply by assuming
law and order somewhere, and then showing how we can
recognise it.
In explaining our notions, philosophers from other than
the Kantian standpoint, assume the notions as existing
outside us, and then it is no difficult task to show how
they come to us, either by inspiration or by observation.
We ask “Why do we have an idea of law in nature?”
“Because natural processes go according to law,” we are
answered, “and experience inherited or acquired, gives us
this notion.”
But when we speak about the law in nature we are
speaking about a notion of our own. So all that these
expositors do is to explain our notion by an assumption
of it.
Kant is very different. He supposes nothing. An experience
such as ours is very different from experience
in the abstract. Imagine just simply experience, succession
of states, of consciousness? Why, there would
be no connecting any two together, there would be no