The fourth dimension

108 THE FOURTH DIMENSION

Does this mean that space and all that it means is due to a condition of the observer ?

If a universal law in one case means nothing affecting the objects themselves, but only a condition of observation, is this true in every case? There is shown us in astronomy a vera causa for the assertion of a universal. Is the same cause to be traced everywhere ?

Such is a first approximation to the doctrine of Kant’s critique.

It is the apprehension of a relation into which, on the one side and the other, perfectly definite constituents enter—the human observer and the stars—and a transference of this relation to a region in which the constituents on either side are perfectly unknown.

If spatiality is due to a condition of the observer, the observer cannot be’tkis bodily self of ours—the body, like the objects around it, are equally in space.

| This conception Kant applied, not only to the intuitions | of sense, but to the: concepts of reason—wherever a universal | statement is made there is afforded him an opportunity | for the application of his principle. He constructed a

_ system in which one hardly knows which the most to

I

// grows.

| admire, the architectonic skill, or the reticence with regard

to things in themselves, and the observer in himself.

His system can be compared to a garden, somewhat formal perhaps, but with the charm of a quality more than intellectual, a besonnenheit, an exquisite moderation over all. And from the ground he so carefully prepared with that buried in obscurity, which it is fitting should be obscure, science blossoms and the tree of real knowledge

The critique is a storehouse of ideas of profound interest. The one of which I have given a partial statement leads, as we shall see on studying it in detail, to a theory of mathematics suggestive of enquiries in many directions.