Note 1173 — Chapter II · SYSTEM OF ALL PRINCIPLES OF PURE UNDERSTANDING

This statement, as Caird has pointed out (i. p. 541), is extremely questionable. “It may be objected that to say that ‘time itself does not change’ is like saying that passing away does not itself pass away. So far the endurance of time and the permanence of the changing might even seem to mean only that the moments of time never cease to pass away, and the changing never ceases to change. A perpetual flux would therefore sufficiently ‘represent’ all the permanence that is in time.” This is not, however, in itself a vital objection to Kant’s argument. For he is here stating more than his argument really requires. Events are dated in a single time, not in an unchanging time. Kant’s statement betrays the extent to which, as Bergson has very justly pointed out, Kant spatialises time, i.e. interprets it on the analogy of space. It is based on “the mixed idea of a measurable time, which is space in so far as it is homogeneity, and duration in so far as it is succession; that is to say, at bottom, the contradictory idea of succession in simultaneity” (Les Données immédiates, p. 173, Eng. trans. p. 228).