united in matter the inconstant flux of time, appearing as change of the accidents, with the rigid immobility of space, which exhibits itself as the permanence of substance. For if the substance passed away like the accidents, the phenomenon would be torn away from space altogether, and would only belong to time; the world of experience would be destroyed by the abolition of matter, annihilation. Thus from the share which space has in matter, i.e., in all phenomena of the actual – in that it is the opposite and counterpart of time, and therefore in itself and apart from the union with the latter knows absolutely no change – the principle of the permanence of substance, which recognises everything as a priori certain, had to be deduced and explained; but not from mere time, to which for this purpose and quite erroneously Kant has attributed permanence.
In the essay on the principle of sufficient reason, § 23, I have fully explained the incorrectness of the following proof of the a priori nature and of the necessity of the law of causality from the mere succession of events in time; I must, therefore, content myself here by referring to that passage.[1] This is precisely the case with the proof of reciprocity also, the concept of which I was obliged to explain above as invalid. What is necessary has also been said of modality, the working out of the principles of which now follows.
There are still a few points in the further course of the transcendental analytic which I should have to refute were it not that I am afraid of trying the patience of the reader; I therefore leave them to his own reflection. But ever anew in the "Critique of Pure Reason" we meet that principal and fundamental error of Kant's, which I have copiously denounced above, the complete failure to distinguish abstract, discursive knowledge from intuitive. It is this that throws a constant obscurity over Kant's whole
- ↑ With my refutation of the Kantian proof may be compared the earlier attacks upon it by Feder, Ueber Zeit, Raum und Kausalität, § 28; and by G. E. Schulze, Kritik der theoretischen Philosophie, Bd. ii. S. 422-442.
