Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/477

IDEALISM AND EMPIRICAL REALISM. 463 or finer sense-organs, or in general, as Kant expresses it, which I could reach " in a possible extension of [my] ex- perience " (iii., 348). Such objects likewise are not phe- nomenally real (or actual) objects (or objects for me), since I have no actual experience of them, and, too, they may be objects that have not been experienced by anybody. They are, however, treated as phenomenally real objects because of this possible connexion between them and my present experience, because they are believed to be experienceable objects that have been, or would have been, or would be, experienced under proper conditions. 1 But if there is any real object apart from the mere series of my possible ex- perience, or of the possible experience of other percipient beings any real objects that exist independently of such experiences or their possibility, this, too, can only be the transcendental object (either a thing-in-itself, or an attri- bute of a thing-in-itself). Kant, however, conceived of such transcendental objects only as things-in-themselves ; and therefore he could speak of such an object even of a past phenomenal existence only in the present tense of general time as the nearest approach to expressing no time (as when we say the sum of two and two is four) ; for according to his transcendental doctrines not only the things-in-themselves but their "determinations" or " manners of existing" do not exist in time and cannot be past any more than present. The peculiarity of all this way of viewing the reality of unexperienced phenomenal things is that such things are regarded as real only so far as we consider that we could experience, or could have experienced, them, although they are admitted not to be real (or actual) when, while, or if not experienced. " The objects of the senses," says Kant, " exist only in experience " (iv., 89) ; and applying to these objects the term " phenomena," he similarly says that " phenomena cannot, as such, exist outside us, but they exist only in our sensibility " (iii., 583). When not existing in anybody's actual experience, they must be thought of merely as potentially real, though Kant never used this expression. And as for the objects of the senses that exist in my experience, evidently these cannot exist in anybody else's experience. The real sense-objects of different individuals are distinct. Distinct also are their spaces, their times, their consciousnesses, their experiences, their phenomenal worlds. The only common objects, really the same for two or more 1 Of. what is practically the definition of " wirklich " in the second Postulate iii., 193, which is frequently repeated.