Hinton - The Fourth Dimension.pdf

APPLICATION TO KANT’S THEORY OF EXPERIENCE 111
To get our ideas clear let us go right back behind the
distinctions of an inner and an outer world. Both of
these, Kant says, are products. Let us take merely states
of consciousness, and not ask the question whether they are
produced or superinduced—to ask such a question is to
have got too far on, to have assumed something of which
we have not traced the origin. Of these states let us
simply say that they occur. Let us now use the word
a “posit” for a phase of consciousness reduced to its
last possible stage of evanescence; let a posit be that
phase of consciousness of which all that can be said is
that it occurs.
Let a, b, c, be three such posits. We cannot represent
them in space without placing them in a certain order,
as a, b, c. But Kant distinguishes between the forms
of sensibility and the concepts of reason. A dream in
which everything happens at haphazard would be an
experience subject to the form of sensibility and only
partially subject to the concepts of reason. It is par-
tially subject to the concepts of reason because, although
there is no order of sequence, still at any given time
there is order. Perception of a thing as in space is a
form of sensibility, the perception of an order is a concept
of reason.
We must, therefore, in order to get at that process
which Kant supposes to be constitutive of an ordered
experience imagine the posits as in space without
order.
As we know them they must be in some order, abc,
bca, cab, acb, cba, bac, one or another.
To represent them as having no order conceive all
these different orders as equally existing. Introduce the
conception of alternativity—let us suppose that the order
abc, and bac, for example, exist equally, so that we
cannot say about a that it comes before or after b. This