Due: February 15, in class
From the Inaugural Dissertation, º 14. 5.
Time is not something objective and real, nor is it a substance, nor an accident, nor a relation. Time is rather the subjective condition which is necessary, in virtue of the nature of the human mind, for the co-ordinating of all sensible things in accordance with a fixed law.
The following is an excerpt from a letter from J. H. Lambert to Kant, dated October 13, 1770 (after the publication of KantÆs Inaugural Dissertation).
All changes are bound to time and are inconceivable without time. If changes are real, then time is real, whatever it may be. If time is unreal, then no change can be real. I think, though, that even an idealist must grant at least that changes really exist and occur in his representations, for example, their beginning and ending. thus time cannot be regarded as something unreal. It is not a substance, and so on, but a finite determination of duration, and like duration, it is somehow real in whatever this reality may consist. If this cannot be identified without danger of confusion, by means of the words we use for other things, it will either require the introduction of a new primitive term or it will have to remain unnamed. The reality of time and of space seems to have something so simple and peculiar about it that it can only be thought and not defined. Duration appears to be inseparable from existence. Whatever exists has a duration that is either absolute or of a certain span, and conversely, whatever has duration must necessarily, while it lasts, exist. Existing things that do not have absolute duration are temporally ordered, in so far as they being, continue, change, cease, and so on. Since I cannot deny reality to changes, until somebody teaches me otherwise, I also cannot say that time (and this is true of space as well) is only a helpful device for human representations.