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Click on the phrases to see them in context. The original texts by Immanuel Kant and David Hume are available from the Gutenberg Projet.
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On the other hand, those who maintain the absolute reality of time and space, whether as essentially subsisting, or only inhering, as modifications, in things, must find themselves at utter variance with the principles of experience itself. III. When we say that the intuition of external objects, and also the self-intuition of the subject, represent both, objects and subject, in space and time, as they affect our senses, that is, as they appear--this is by no means equivalent to asserting that these objects are mere illusory appearances. Hence it follows that an a priori intuition (which is not empirical) lies at the root of all our conceptions of space. On this successive synthesis of the productive imagination, in the generation of figures, is founded the mathematics of extension, or geometry, with its axioms, which express the conditions of sensuous intuition a priori, under which alone the schema of a pure conception of external intuition can exist; for example, "be tween two points only one straight line is possible," "two straight lines cannot enclose a space," etc. But the same is the case with this law as with other pure a priori representations (e.g., space and time), which we can draw in perfect clearness and completeness from experience, only because we had already placed them therein, and by that means, and by that alone, had rendered experience possible. But things in space and time are given only in so far as they are perceptions (representations accompanied with sensation), therefore only by empirical representation. It may, for example, be alleged, that a limit to the world, as regards both space and time, is quite possible, without at the same time holding the existence of an absolute time before the beginning of the world, or an absolute space extending beyond the actual world--which is impossible. These representations, in so far as they are connected and determinable in this relation (in space and time) according to laws of the unity of experience, are called objects.