The metaphysic of experience Volume 1

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1898 edition. Excerpt: ... own form was concerned, it was projected whole. But then Kant had provided, in his theory, for an agent to which he could refer it; he supposed the existence of a non-phenomenal agent working under certain laws or forms of its own, one of which was Space, which it imposed upon sensations in receiving them. Those who reject hypotheses of this kind have necessarih' to find some other account of space; I mean always, supposing them to philosophise. For the mathematician may be content to stop short at space as a datum. But for the metaphysician, the rejection of a transcendental psychology, like Kant,s, means nothing less than re-opening the question, whether space, the pre-philosophic datum, is analysable or not, and if analysable, whether it is or is not analysable into parts which were originally separate from one another, and have been combined only by means of a historical process of association. I am of course speaking of space subjectively taken, or what is commonly called our knowledge or idea of it, which is the space of actual experience; the question being whether this experience is ana-lysable into separable constituents, as well as into elements which are distinguishable but inseparable from each other. Now this question, so far as it is one of subjective analysis only, and apart from questions (which will meet us farther on) concerning the psychological genesis of the perceptions analysed, is readily answerable. It must clearly be answered in the affirmative, when we consider that the sensations which contain or involve a direct and immediate perception of spatial extension are of two kinds only, those classed as sensations of sight and touch; that neither kind gives us any of the mathematical boundaries of space, I mean points,...