The fourth dimension

APPLICATION TO KANT’S THEORY OF EXPERIENCE 111

To get our ideas clear let us go right back behind the distinctions of an inner and an outer world. Both of these, Kant says, are products. Let us take merely states of consciousness, and not ask the question whether they are produced or superinduced—to ask such a question is to have got too far on, to have assumed something of which we have not traced the origin. Of these states let us simply say that they occur. Let us now use the word a “posit” for a phase of consciousness reduced to its last possible stage of evanescence; let a posit be that phase of consciousness of which all that can be said is that it occurs.

Let a, 6, c, be three such posits. We cannot represent them in space without placing them in a certain order, as ad, b,c. But Kant distinguishes between the forms of sensibility and the concepts of reason. A dream in which everything happens at haphazard would be an experience subject to the form of sensibility and only partially subject to the concepts of reason. It is partially subject to the concepts of reason because, although there is no order of sequence, still at any given time there is order. Perception of a thing as in space is a form of sensibility, the perception of an order is a concept of reason.

We must, therefore, in order to get at that process which Kant supposes to be constitutive of an ordered experience imagine the posits as in space without order.

As we know them they must be in some order, abe, bea, cab, acb, cha, bac, one or another.

To represent them as having no order conceive all these different orders as equally existing. Introduce the conception of alternativity—let us suppose that the order abe, and bac, for example, exist equally, so that we cannot say about @ that it comes before or after b. This