One of the most common sightings of our experience, and yet one which is really quite remarkable, is to see that something is "back again." Now we are not speaking so much of the objective, perceiver-independent conditions for such a sighting, but rather the internal, mind-conditioned aspects. For on its own an object, let it be my coffee cup, is no different* the second time it is sighted than the first time.** Therefore when I apprehend the cup, it is impossible to tell from the sensations striking my eyes and my other organs of sense whether it is the first sighting or whether it is the second, i.e., if the sightings were reversed I would not have been able to discern the least difference. There is nothing relating to the cup that could be intuited as pertaining to time (nor also to space, for that matter), but rather must be presupposed necessarily in order to make such a sighting as "a second time"*** or "back hereness or back againess." There is no time in the sighting (of back again) on its own, but only in the mind of the perceiver making the observation. It is real, this time in which this second time arises to our obvious view; but it is within us and not in the cup on its own and so could neither be intuited or derived from experience. The same reasoning holds of space, for there is no objectively existing "hereness" such that it could be intuited or derived from sightings in some way, and must rather be added to the scene by the observer, for otherwise (in lieu of such self-activity in the perception) each sighting is a thing on its own, and not bound in time or space with any other on its own at all.

[* I am presuming no perceivable change in the cup otherwise, e.g., that it be broken or full or empty or clean, etc.]

[** Technically speaking, any time I blink my eyes I have a new sighting, but this is not relevant in the present case.]

[*** I am reminded of Hobbes' celebrated village idiot who was able to say accurately and precisely and confidently, "One . . . one . . .one, " every time the town clock struck three.]

All these sightings ultimately are specters/appearances (Erscheinungen) in our eyes (on our sense organs in general), and that is in fact the ultimate explanation and justification for our understanding itself, i.e., that we posite things (the so-called empirical thing on its own) which are different from what we actually see* (the view of the thing, which [view] is spectral and entirely in our eye) in order to combine what we actually see (the specters) into a unification (the object) in time and space in order to demote the specters to mere views of that object. E.g., the thud (I hear, for example, of a striking ax) did not precede the "embedment" of the ax in the wood, but rather I was looking in a different direction (we will say in this example) so that when I turned and looked, what I saw was the ax afterwards, ** i.e., the embedded ax, and add to that conception (verbally, I suppose) the essential elements which will constitute a unified span of time which is made up of a series of diversity (the multiplicity), e.g., the ax actually struck before the sound, but I was turned away, looking in the opposite direction, and first heard the sound of ax, which in fact always follows upon the vision,*** and that caught my attention and made me turn and I saw the after-effects of that ax.

[* What we immediately see is mental as the least reflection on the split-finger phenomenon will indicate, and it is only by means of conceiving (or dreaming up [like a novelist really!]) a single finger and a two-eyed perceiver that we are able to recognize the object, i.e., an illusion. This occurs about so, I would guess: while seeing a split finger, something suddenly happens to cover one of our eyes, and we are intrigue by the apparent correlation of single finger and touch of the covering (which is a consciousness of time, this correlation), and at this point undertake an experiment by means of an a priori apperception/consciousness by removing the cover (which might be nothing more than our own hand) and looking and then replacing the covering and looking again. The remainder is the function of the understanding, namely conceiving of the object such that this sighting would be necessitated.]

[** There's that funny little word "after" again. If I were teaching math and wanted a student to get beyond the "one . . . one" of the village idiot cited in an earlier footnote, I would have to find something to relate to the "and" of "one and one is two"**** but that is only a pause for the purposes of differentiation, and that pause would mean saying "and one and one and is and two and." Or so it seems to me.]

[*** And here it is that we part company with Hume, for Hume, according to his system taken with extreme rigor, could never come to the notion of a "must be" and so would have no reason to think that the sounds of the striking did not occasionally precede the fall of the ax (like what we call imagination or a day-dream), and so really would have no way of differentiating dreams from waking perception; but that makes an entirely different world from the world of human experience.]

[**** Or is it "are two?" ;-) ]

And so it is that we conceive of a world such that the specters can be derived from it and integrated with others into it, e.g., that the others are telling the truth with regard to the rainbow story.* For otherwise there is no more connection between the raised ax and the embedded ax than there is between the iron of the ax head and a bubbling fountain 1,000 miles way. They are different in the same way that a box is different from a car, i.e., there is a family resemblance (à la Hume), and which is very strong sometimes, but it is only feeling and entirely contingent.

The initial awakening for our process of understanding (I would think) is the sighting of things in time and space, the fact that one specter comes after another and the fact that one specter stands next to another or apart from it, etc., and these notions of "after" and "next to" have no objective reality except in the sighting of the perceiver, and there is no certainty that other beings happen to be able to make such sightings (and not rather even other sorts than merely time and space) since (animal) movement about in the world functions according to feelings and confidence which can arise through exposure and association. Therefore, if time and space were not the framework of the human mind, in our sensing capacity, they would never once ever come to mind. Theoretically seen then, as Newton would have conceived it, time and space, being empty, non-sensitive "containers" of all reality, would not be subject to perception, any more than it is possible to perceive the absence of unicorns.

It might be worth while to add here quickly another consideration that Kant makes with regard to the envisagements of space and time. He states in the heart of the transcendental deduction of the B version of the categories (TDB.26.3) that time and space are not merley the forms of our envisagement (sighting) of things in the world, i.e., our arrangement of the specters, but rather are envisagements themselves like the objects depicted by the geometer and the scientist of nature. And in order for this to be true, Kant continues, it is necessary that a synthesis be undertaken and which therefore requires the understanding, although not the category (for time and space are conceived of as infinite givens, according to Kant). This is much like the envisagement of the drawing of a circle in mid air which is given in my essay by that same name (Circles in Mid Air) on my web site and in the Kant-Studien journal for 1996, and to which the reader is invited to turn.