Mary Whiton Calkins

“ Kant’s persuasion that Leibniz believes space and time to be objects of confused sense-consciousness explains an apparent inconsistency in his criticism. This has presupposed almost throughout that Leibniz treats space and time as relations of things in themselves. It is therefore very misleading to meet, not infrequently, the assertion that Leibniz believes space and time to be relations of phenomena and of phenomenal states. ”

“ The Antinomies also definitely direct themselves against the doctrine of the objective reality. But by far the largest part of Kant’s criticism relates itself to an important consequence of the doctrine that space and time are real relations of real things and events; that is, to the teaching, which Kant attributes to Leibniz, that our consciousness of space and of time is an empirical, a posteriori consciousness, a mere passive being impressed by these relations, which are external to us and independent of us. ”

“ The positive doctrine of Leibniz is most frequently summarized in the statement common to the Nouveaux Essais [16] and to the correspondence with Clarke, [17] that space is the order of the coexistent, and time the order of the successive. This expression must be scrutinized more closely. It has been interpreted by Kant, and by others, to mean that the order (that is, the space) of things, and the order (that is, the time) of events, is secondary to the things and the events themselves,—real only in so far as they are real, as if things and events first existed and then were ordered. ”

“ And in the following section “those who hold that space is not anything objective and real, but that it is subjective and ideal” are contrasted with those who “defend the reality of space,’ while among these, “the men who regard space as an absolute and immense reservoir (receptaculum) ” are distinguished from those who contend that space is “a relation of existing things which would wholly vanish if the things were taken away.”
Though Leibniz is not named in the Prolegomena, Kant evidently refers to him by the allusion to “mathematicians who were at the same time philosophers.” ”

“ In the fifth letter of Leibniz to Clarke, for instance, it is supported by the remark that things, while they change their time relations and their position in space, still retain their form and their duration. ”Finite space is not the extension of bodies, as time is not duration. ... Everything has its own extension and its own duration, but does not have its own time, and does not occupy (ne garde point) its own space. ”

“ For much of Leibniz’s discussion of extension is a criticism and refutation of Descartes’ doctrine of the identity of matter with extension; and he always insists that matter requires more than extension, that is, antitypia or passive resistance. ”

“ The main points of this criticism have already been suggested. In the first place, Kant ranks Leibniz with Newton, as holding to the extra-mental reality of space and time. Leibniz is distinguished from Newton on the ground of his teaching that space, though real, is an ‘abstract real,’ that is, not a substance, but rather the quality of a substance. This statement occurs twice in the Dissertation,—first, in section 14, where Kant mentions “those English philosophers who assert the objective reality of time, or, as it were,a certain stream (flurum) ... ”

“ The longest-living author of this work died in 1930, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 92 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works. ”