Note 135 — Introductory material

Before proceeding further, it is necessary to discuss the important special case where a form of externality has only one dimension. Of the two such forms, given in experience, one, namely time, presents an instance of this special case. But it may be shown, I think, that the function, in constituting the possibility of experience, which we demand of such forms, could not be accomplished by a one-dimensional form alone. For in a one-dimensional form, the various contents may be arranged in a series, and cannot, without interpenetration, change the order of contents in the series. But interpenetration is impossible, since a form of externality is the mere expression of diversity among things, from which it follows that things cannot occupy the same position in a form, unless there is another form by which to differentiate them. For without externality, there is no diversity[142]. Thus two bodies may occupy the same space, but only at different times: two things may exist simultaneously, but only at different places. A form of one dimension, therefore, could not, by itself, allow that change of the relations of externality, by which alone a varied world of interrelated things can be brought into consciousness. In a one-dimensional space, for example, only a single object, which must appear as a point, or two objects at most, one in front and one behind, could ever be perceived. Thus two or more dimensions seem an essential condition of anything worth calling an experience of interrelated things.