Chapter 3 Part I The World as Representation §3

The chief distinction in all our representations is that of intuitive and abstract representations.The latter constitute only one class of representations, the concept.And the concept is only exclusive to human beings on earth.This makes man different from the ability of animals, the ability to reach concepts, which has always been called rationality.We shall later consider this abstract representation separately, and for the present we shall confine ourselves to intuitive representations.Intuitive representations include the whole visible world or experience, together with the conditions under which it is possible.As I said before, this is a very important discovery of Kant. He just said that these conditions of experience, these forms, are the most common things in the perception of the world, things that all phenomena in the world share in the same way, Time and space, alone and apart from their content, can not only be thought abstractly, but also directly intuited.And this intuition is not an illusion borrowed from the repetition of some experience, but is so independent of experience that it should be conceived conversely that experience is dependent on it, since the properties of space and time, as the intuition knows a priori Yes, the laws that are valid as all possible experience are valid; experience must be effected according to these laws everywhere.For this reason, in my treatise on the principle of sufficient reason, I regarded time and space, so far as they are intuited purely and without content, as a special, self-existing class of representations.This is so important in the nature of the universal forms of intuition discovered by Kant, namely that these forms are independent of experience alone.Intuition can be known in all its regularities on which mathematics and its precision are based: but the general form of intuition has another, equally noteworthy property, namely, the principle of sufficient reason, which determines the For the law of causality and motivation, while defining thinking as the law of reason of judgment, it appears here in a very special form; this form I have called the reason of existence.In terms of time, this form is the succession of each instant; in terms of space, it is the part of space that defines each other until it is infinite.

Whoever clearly understands from that preface that the law of sufficient reason has a complete identity in content while being different in form, will also be convinced that in order to understand the innermost essence of this law, it is the simplest way to know it. How unnecessary is a constitutive form of time that we have recognized as time.Just as in time each instant has its existence only after it has devoured the previous instant, its "father," and is swallowed up again just as quickly; just as past and future (regardless of their contental consequences) A dream is so nothing; so is the present but an inextensible and insubstantial boundary between the past and the future; and we shall see the same nothingness again in all other forms of the principle of sufficient reason; and as space is perceived as time is; As with space, so is everything that is in both space and time.Therefore, everything that happens from cause and motive has only a relative actual existence, and has its existence only because of, and only for, something else, which, like itself, exists only as such.What is essential in this insight is ancient: in it Heraclitus complained of the fluidity of all things; Pinoza calls it the accident of that only in which there is an unchanging substance; Kant contrasts [everything] thus known as phenomena, against "things in themselves."Finally, the ancient sages of India said: "This is Maya, the veil of the deceitful [God], which blinds the eyes of mortals so that they see a world which neither can be said to exist nor to be said not to exist, because It is like a dream, like the sun shining on the sand, and passers-by from a distance think it is water, like a rope thrown on the ground. People regard it as a snake." (such a metaphor, Repeated countless times in the Vedas and Brananas.) What is meant and said here is nothing else but what we are now considering: under the rule of the principle of sufficient reason The world as representation.