Abstract Space and Time

Our ideas are either:

1. Abstract

These form a class of ideas called concepts.

Only humans have concepts through the ability of reason which separates us from animals.

2. Perception

These comprehend the whole visible world, or all of possible experience.

Kant made the important discovery that the universal element of perception is space and time.

Space and time can be perceived:

• in the abstract and
• in reality

This perception of space and time

The qualities of abstract space and time are:

• entirely independent of experience
• valid for all possible experience.

It means that experience is dependent on space and time.

My principle of sufficient reason deals with space and time because space and time are perceived as pure and empty of content, as a special and independent class of ideas.

Kant discovered the abstract space-and-time quality of the universal forms of intuition.

Abstract space-and-time is the basis of mathematics.

I call “ground of being” the movement in time and movement in space.

I wrote that space and time are perceived as pure and empty of content, as a special and independent class of ideas.

This quality of the universal forms of intuition was discovered by Kant.

They may be:

• perceived in themselves separate from experience
• known as exhibiting those laws that is the basis of mathematics

This is very important.

Not less worthy of remark, however, is this other quality of time and space, that the

My principle of sufficient reason says that:

• experience follows the:
  • law of causation, and
  • law of motive
• thought is the basis of judgment

I call experience as the ‘ground of being’.

• In time, this ground of being is the succession of its moments
• In space, this ground of being is the position of its parts
  • These parts reciprocally determine each other infinitely.

This simplest form of the flow of cognition is time.

In the idea of time, each instant is a generator of time, to be itself in turn as quickly effaced.

The abstract past time and future time are empty as a dream.

The present is only the indivisible and unenduring boundary between them.

All the other forms of the flow of cognition [principle of sufficient reason] has the same emptiness.

• abstract time
• abstract space
• the whole abstract content of both of them
  • All that comes from causes and motives has a relative existence and does not last

The substance of this doctrine is old.

It appears in:

• Heraclitus when he laments the eternal flux of things
• Plato when he degrades the object to that which is ever becoming, but never being
• Spinoza as the doctrine of the mere accidents of the one substance which is and endures.

Kant opposes what is thus known as the mere phenomenon to the thing in itself.

The Indian philosophers declares “It is Mâyâ which blinds mortals and makes them behold a world that either exists or not. It is like a dream."

They all refer to the the world being an idea subject to the flow of cognition [the principle of sufficient reason].