Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/481

IDEALISM AND EMPIRICAL REALISM. 467 are not extended in space but are only successive in time, such as my thoughts and feelings or emotions, and then also allows them, in a wider sense, to cover objects extended in space, since these are also successive in time. There is here a doubleness in the use of terms within the field of experience itself, which Kant in no wise tries to avoid, but rather turns to his account. For now many of our empirical objects can be described both as outside us and as inside us. This use of language could easily be avoided by refraining from speaking of extended objects as objects " outside me," which expression is highly improper, because, so applied, it has no meaning whatever, since the "me" here spoken of is not an object extended in space (for by " me " Kant cannot be referring to my body), and things outside one another in space are not outside anything not in space (except transcendentally, which is a manner not now under consideration). But by using this expression as synonymous with " extended " Kant does not make merely a confusion in the use of words. He makes also a confusion in thought, concerning the actual relation- ship of extended objects to the percipient subject. For he evidently has in mind the fact that objects extended in the one space the same for all men would be outside the spaces that are peculiar to individual persons, and therefore would be really outside me, as well transcendentally as empirically. Yet their transcendental outsideness he is able to ignore because of their empirical outsideness (their being extended in some space) and because of their empirical insideness (their being successive in time). And so by placing objects extended simply "in space," indefinitely, also in me, he gets all the advantages of treating merely of objects "in me," objects wholly within my power, of which I can have con- sciousness, and about which I can know everything there is to know, since nothing can be there but what I am conscious of as being there. Thus in the first edition of the Kritik, when trying to find a paralogism in the position of the so-called Empirical Idealists, there described as merely doubting the existence of outside things because of inability to prove it demonstratively, he maintained that no proof is needed because we have direct consciousness of the existence of out- side things. Eeally the paralogism is in Kant's own position. He is trying to make out that the Empirical Idealists were surreptitiously transforming their proper doubt (or admission of want of certainty) about the existence of things outside us transcendentally into an improper doubt about the existence of things outside us empirically (i.e. about the existence of merely extended objects or representations)