The German Genius

irrespective of the person making the measurement. It is true, as Kant put it, without reference to experience: it is universally true and “from the first” (a priori). 16
    How does this difference arise? Kant’s answer was that the shapes of geometry are “ideal constructions” of our mind. Geometry is in effect a creation of the human mind, insofar as no one has ever seen a “pure” triangle, say, without any other attributes. Such a phenomenon does not—could not—exist. The figures and triangles that we see about us are only imperfect representations. This, for Kant, was very important for it showed that cognition of the world, how we know the world, “need not necessarily be the product of experience, of the mere functioning of our senses.” Experience is the raw material but those experiences only become fully intelligible through the “productive activity” of the mind. Thought creates concepts .
    Kant is saying that we do not have in our heads, as it were, an image of the world “out there” instead we have an idea of how it appears to us, according to the laws of our intellectual make-up, which are present a priori, and which—invariably, inevitably, and necessarily—shape experiences a posteriori. Because of this we can never know anything “in itself.” 17
    Kant identified several a priori aspects of our minds, of which the two most important were space and time. He was saying that we are born with an intuition of space and time, we understand them without experiencing them, in advance of any real sensation. Space and time, he argued, are not properties belonging to objects, but are merely subjective ideas we impose on them. Kant thought his case was proved by our idea that space is infinite, “which no one can experience or demonstrate.” Though we can imagine space with nothing in it, we cannot imagine the absence of space itself. 18 The same is true of time. As with space, we can imagine not much happening over a certain period but we cannot imagine the absence of time itself. Time as we understand it—as with space—has no beginning and no end, it is infinite. It cannot stem from experience.
    Kant’s underlying point was that our minds are “living, actively operative organisms,” not passively receiving information from without, through the senses and summed through experience; instead our minds shape our perceptions according to their own laws. He didn’t stop at space and time but identified twelve categories or laws of thought, which shape how we understand the world. Among them he included “unity,” “multiplicity,” “causality,” and “possibility.” “Things in themselves possess neither unity nor multiplicity…we ourselves, through the operation of our understanding, combine certain impressions a priori into a unity or multiplicity (trunk, branches, twigs, leaves, into the concept tree).” Kant did not say that there is no connection between the outer and inner world. Scientific experiments, for example, proved that there is a close connection. Insofar as we are able to manipulate phenomena in ways that others can replicate, “There must exist common ground between the sensuous world and the understanding.” 19
    This approach raised an intriguing set of questions in the world between doubt and Darwin. For example, where did it leave the question of God? Was what Kant was saying evidence for a metaphysical world that exists beyond reality, beyond our senses and our understanding? Many people cannot imagine a world without God, just as they cannot imagine a world without space, so did that make God an a priori intuition as real as space or time? Kant thought that the intuition to recognize the connection between external phenomena led to the idea of the universe , the absolute whole. This idea of the “whole” carried with it the further idea of an ultimate cause of the whole. By the same token, the fact that the inner structures—or laws—of our minds form a whole, a connected, interlocking, understandable whole, produces an equivalent idea, holding everything together—this is the concept of the soul. From there it was no great jump to say that the inner and outer worlds, soul and universe, point to an ultimate common basis, embracing both. The entity that “ holds and unites” everything we give the name of God. 20
    It is not quite as simple as that. The universe might be an “absolute necessity,” given the structure of our minds, but we