Download (PDF, 23.58MB) - Plurality Press

106 THE FOURFOLD BOOT. [CHAP. IV.
stance, of empirically known laws of Nature in that we
can conceive no exception to the causal law anywhere
within the world of experience. We can, for instance,
conceive that in an exceptional case the law of gravitation
might cease to act, but not that this could happen without
a cause.
Kant and Hume have fallen into opposite errors in their
proofs. Hume asserts that all consequence is mere se
quence ; whereas Kant affirms that all sequence must ne
cessarily be consequence. Pure Understanding, it is true,
can only conceive consequence (causal result), and is no
more able to conceive mere sequence than to conceive the
difference between right and left, which, like sequence, is
only to be grasped by means of pure Sensibility. Empirical
knowledge of the following of events in Time is, indeed,
just as possible as empirical knowledge of juxtaposition of
things in Space (this Kant denies elsewhere), but the way
in which things follow upon one another in general in Time
can no more be explained, than the way in which one thing
follows from another (as the effect of a cause)
: the former
knowledge is given and conditioned by pure Sensibility ;
the latter, by pure Understanding. But in asserting that
knowledge of the objective succession of phenomena can
only be attained by means of the causal law, Kant commits
*
the same error with which he reproaches Leibnitz :
of
that
"
iiitellectualising the forms of Sensibility." My view
of succession is the following one. We derive our know
ledge of the bare possibility of succession from the form
of Time, which belongs to pure Sensibility. The suc
cession of real objects, whose form is precisely Time,
we know empirically, consequently as actual. But it is
means of Causality,
through the Understanding alone, by
that we gain knowledge of the necessity of a succession of
1
Kant,
"
Kritik d. r. Vern." 1st edition, p. 275 5th j edition, p. 331.
(English translation by M. Miiller, p. 236.)