| But how and by what can we fix and determine this point of time, unless by that which already exists? |
| For a void time--preceding--is not an object of perception; but if we connect this beginning with objects which existed previously, and which continue to exist till the object in question in question begins to be, then the latter can only be a determination of the former as the permanent. |
| The same holds good of the notion of extinction, for this presupposes the empirical representation of a time, in which a phenomenon no longer exists. |
| Substances (in the world of phenomena) are the substratum of all determinations of time. |
| The beginning of some, and the ceasing to be of other substances, would utterly do away with the only condition of the empirical unity of time; and in that case phenomena would relate to two different times, in which, side by side, existence would pass; which is absurd. |
| For there is only one time in which all different times must be placed, not as coexistent, but as successive. |
| Accordingly, permanence is a necessary condition under which alone phenomena, as things or objects, are determinable in a possible experience. |
| But as regards the empirical criterion of this necessary permanence, and with it of the substantiality of phenomena, we shall find sufficient opportunity to speak in the sequel. |
| B. SECOND ANALOGY. |
| Principle of the Succession of Time According to the Law of Causality. |
| All changes take place according to the law of the connection of Cause and Effect. |
| PROOF. |
| (That all phenomena in the succession of time are only changes, that is, a successive being and non-being of the determinations of substance, which is permanent; consequently that a being of substance itself which follows on the non-being thereof, or a non-being of substance which follows on the being thereof, in other words, that the origin or extinction of substance itself, is impossible--all this has been fully established in treating of the foregoing principle. |
| This principle might have been expressed as follows; "All alteration (succession) of phenomena is merely change"; for the changes of substance are not origin or extinction, because the conception of change presupposes the same subject as existing with two opposite determinations, and consequently as permanent. |
| After this premonition, we shall proceed to the proof.) |
| I perceive that phenomena succeed one another, that is to say, a state of things exists at one time, the opposite of which existed in a former state. |
| In this case, then, I really connect together two perceptions in time. |
| Now connection is not an operation of mere sense and intuition, but is the product of a synthetical faculty of imagination, which determines the internal sense in respect of a relation of time. |
| But imagination can connect these two states in two ways, so that either the one or the other may antecede in time; for time in itself cannot be an object of perception, and what in an object precedes and what follows cannot be empirically determined in relation to it. |
| I am only conscious, then, that my imagination places one state before and the other after; not that the one state antecedes the other in the object. |
| In other words, the objective relation of the successive phenomena remains quite undetermined by means of mere perception. |