Everything you see is part of the world around you, but how you see it is
determined by the glasses you are wearing. So you cannot say the world is
red even though you conceive it as being so.”
“No, naturally.”
“If you now took a walk in the woods, or home to Captain’s Bend, you
would see everything the way you normally do. But whatever you saw, it
would all be red.”
“As long as I didn’t take the glasses off, yes.”
“And that, Sophie, is precisely what Kant meant when he said that there
are certain conditions governing the mind’s operation which influence the way
we experience the world.”
“What kind of conditions?”
“Whatever we see will first and foremost be perceived as phenomena in
time and space. Kant called ‘time’ and ‘space’ our two ‘forms of intuition.’ And
he emphasized that these two ‘forms’ in our own mind precede every ex-
perience. In other words, we can know before we experience things that we
will perceive them as phenomena in time and space. For we are not able to
take off the ‘glasses’ of reason.”
“So he thought that perceiving things in time and space was innate?”
“Yes, in a way. What we see may depend on whether we are raised in
India or Greenland, but wherever we are, we experience the world as a series
of processes in time and space. This is something we can say beforehand.”
“But aren’t time and space things that exist beyond ourselves?”
“No. Kant’s idea was that time and space belong to the human condition.
Time and space are first and foremost modes of perception and not attributes
or the physical world.”
“That was a whole new way of looking at things.”
“For the mind of man is not just ‘passive wax’ which simply receives
sensations from outside. The mind leaves its imprint on the way we
apprehend the world. You could compare it with what happens when you pour
water into a glass pitcher. The water adapts itself to the pitcher’s form. In the
same way our perceptions adapt themselves to our ‘forms of intuition.’ “
“I think I understand what you mean.”
“Kant claimed that it is not only mind which conforms to things. Things
also conform to the mind. Kant called this the Copernican Revolution in the
problem of human knowledge.
“By that he meant that it was just as new and just as radically different
from former thinking as when Copernicus claimed that the earth revolved
around the sun and not vice versa.”
“I see now how he could think both the rationalists and the empiricists
were right up to a point. The rationalists had almost forgotten the importance
of experience, and the empiricists had shut their eyes to the way our own
mind influences the way we see the world.”
“And even the law of causality—which Hume believed man could not
experience—belongs to the mind, according to Kant.”
“Explain that, please.”
“You remember how Hume claimed that it was only force of habit that
made us see a causal link behind all natural processes. According to Hume,
we cannot perceive the black billiard ball as being the cause of the white ball’s
movement. Therefore, we cannot prove that the black billiard ball will always