SUPPLEMENT XX - Friedrich Max Müller, Critique of Pure Reason [1881]
Edition used:
Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In Commemoration of the Centenary of its First Publication. Translated into English by F. Max Mueller (2nd revised ed.) (New York: Macmillan, 1922).
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SUPPLEMENT XX
[See page 172]
C. Third Analogy
Principle of Coexistence, according to the Law of Reciprocity or Community
All substances, so far as they can be perceived as coexistent in space, are always affecting each other reciprocally.
Proof
Things are coexistent when, in empirical intuition, the perception of the one can follow upon the perception of the other, and vice versa, which, as was shown in the second principle, is impossible in the temporal succession of phenomena. Thus I may first observe the moon and afterwards the earth, or, conversely also, first the earth and afterwards the moon, and because the perceptions of these objects can follow each other in both ways, I say that they are coexistent. Now coexistence is the existence of the manifold in the same time. Time itself, however, cannot be perceived, so that we might learn from the fact that things exist in the same time that their perceptions can follow each other reciprocally. The synthesis of imagination in apprehension would, therefore, give us each of these perceptions as existing in the subject, when the other is absent, and vice versa: it would never tell us that the objects are coexistent, that is, that if the one is there, the other also must be there in the same time, and this by necessity, so that the perceptions may follow each other reciprocally. Hence we require a concept of understanding of the reciprocal sequence of determinations of things existing at the same time, but outside each other, in order to be able to say, that the reciprocal sequence of the perceptions is founded in the object, and thus to represent their coexistence as objective. The relation of substances, however, of which the first has determinations the ground of which is contained in the other, is the relation of influence, and if, conversely also, the first contains the ground of determinations in the latter, the relation is that of community or reciprocity. Hence the coexistence of substances in space cannot be known in experience otherwise but under the supposition of reciprocal action: and this is therefore the condition also of the possibility of things themselves as objects of experience.