Hinton - The Fourth Dimension.pdf

110
THE FOURTH DIMENSION
personal identity, no memory. It is out of a general
experience such as this, which, in respect to anything we
call real, is less than a dream, that Kant shows the
genesis of an experience such as ours.
Kant takes up the problem of the explanation of space,
time, order, and so quite logically does not presuppose
them.
But how, when every act of thought is of things in
space, and time, and ordered, shall we represent to ourselves
that perfectly indefinite somewhat which is Kant’s
necessary hypothesis—that which is not in space or time
and is not ordered. That is our problem, to represent
that which Kant assumes not subject to any of our forms
of thought, and then show some function which working
on that makes it into a “nature” subject to law and
order, in space and time. Such a function Kant calls the
“Unity of Apperception”; i.e., that which makes our state
of consciousness capable of being woven into a system
with a self, an outer world, memory, law, cause, and order.
The difficulty that meets us in discussing Kant’s
hypothesis is that everything we think of is in space
and time—how then shall we represent in space an existence
not in space, and in time an existence not in time?
This difficulty is still more evident when we come to
construct a poiograph, for a poiograph is essentially a
space structure. But because more evident the difficulty
is nearer a solution. If we always think in space, i.e.
using space concepts, the first condition requisite for
adapting them to the representation of non-spatial existence,
is to be aware of the limitation of our thought,
and so be able to take the proper steps to overcome it.
The problem before us, then, is to represent in space an
existence not in space.
The solution is an easy one. It is provided by the
conception of alternativity.