| These principles cannot be derived from experience, for it would give neither strict universality, nor apodeictic certainty. |
| We should only be able to say, "so common experience teaches us," but not "it must be so." They are valid as rules, through which, in general, experience is possible; and they instruct us respecting experience, and not by means of it. |
| 4. Time is not a discursive, or as it is called, general conception, but a pure form of the sensuous intuition. |
| Different times are merely parts of one and the same time. |
| But the representation which can only be given by a single object is an intuition. |
| Besides, the proposition that different times cannot be coexistent could not be derived from a general conception. |
| For this proposition is synthetical, and therefore cannot spring out of conceptions alone. |
| It is therefore contained immediately in the intuition and representation of time. |
| 5. The infinity of time signifies nothing more than that every determined quantity of time is possible only through limitations of one time lying at the foundation. |
| Consequently, the original representation, time, must be given as unlimited. |
| But as the determinate representation of the parts of time and of every quantity of an object can only be obtained by limitation, the complete representation of time must not be furnished by means of conceptions, for these contain only partial representations. |
| Conceptions, on the contrary, must have immediate intuition for their basis. |
| SS 6 Transcendental Exposition of the Conception of Time. |
| I may here refer to what is said above (SS 5, 3), where, for or sake of brevity, I have placed under the head of metaphysical exposition, that which is properly transcendental. |
| Here I shall add that the conception of change, and with it the conception of motion, as change of place, is possible only through and in the representation of time; that if this representation were not an intuition (internal) a priori, no conception, of whatever kind, could render comprehensible the possibility of change, in other words, of a conjunction of contradictorily opposed predicates in one and the same object, for example, the presence of a thing in a place and the non-presence of the same thing in the same place. |
| It is only in time that it is possible to meet with two contradictorily opposed determinations in one thing, that is, after each other. |
| thus our conception of time explains the possibility of so much synthetical knowledge a priori, as is exhibited in the general doctrine of motion, which is not a little fruitful. |
| SS 7. Conclusions from the above Conceptions. |
| (a) Time is not something which subsists of itself, or which inheres in things as an objective determination, and therefore remains, when abstraction is made of the subjective conditions of the intuition of things. |
| For in the former case, it would be something real, yet without presenting to any power of perception any real object. |
| In the latter case, as an order or determination inherent in things themselves, it could not be antecedent to things, as their condition, nor discerned or intuited by means of synthetical propositions a priorI. But all this is quite possible when we regard time as merely the subjective condition under which all our intuitions take place. |