74 theory
to realize that no one book of Kant contains all of it. FromThe Critique of Pure
ReasontoReligion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason, Kant constantly broadens
and deepens the presentation of his view, if not the view itself. The account in
The Critique of Pure Reasonis, nonetheless, the basis on which the deeper and
broader reflections in Kant’s subsequent writings depend.
Hume, as we just saw, conceives of experiences on the model of pictures
and their cognitive content as contained and communicated via (sensory)re-
semblance. Only sensory qualities are, thus, properly cognizable at all. If one
accepts this, then many of Hume’s other famous doctrines readily follow: for
example, Hume’s claim that we don’t “observe” causal connection depends
both on Hume’s limitation of what we can observe to sensory qualities and on
his very narrow inventory of sensory qualities: since causal connection is not
a sensory quality for Hume, it is evident to him that casual connection is never
observed. On the other hand, although objective time hardly consists of sensory
qualities either, Hume never worries about the question, “How and why are
we able to think of impressions and ‘ideas’ as succeeding one another in an
objective time?”
Kant did, however, worry about this question, and he concluded that our
notions of objective time, causality, and lawful connection areinterdependent.
For example, our awareness of a boat sailing down a river (coming, let us say,
to a certain bridge) asearlierthan the boat sailingbeyondthe bridge, even
though we think of a building’s back as existing at the same time as the front
even if we look at the frontbeforewe look at the back, are internally related to
our beliefs that we could have chosen to experience the front before the back,
but we could not, conditions being as they were, have chosen to experience the
boat sailing beyond the bridgebeforewe experienced it approaching the bridge,
and these beliefs are in turn related to the system of causal connections we
accept.^8 The notion of time is inextricably connected with the notions of space
and causality. This is not just a fact about Newton’s physics, or Einstein’s, but
about our ordinary conceptual scheme as well. Imagine, just as a thought-
experiment, that there is a (more or less instantaneous) world-state, call it “A,”
consisting of a sense-impression as of a cat chasing a mouse; a world-state,
call it “B,” consisting of a sense-impression as of a twelve-foot cat singing
“Yankee Doodle”; and a world-state, call it “C,” consisting of a sense-impression
as of a purple tidal wave sweeping over a field of flowers with heads like Charlie
Chaplin. What sense would it have to say that these arestates of one and the
same world, let alone to speak of them as temporally ordered, if there are no
causal connections of any kind between them?^9 Hume’s argument depends
upon our thinking of the concepts “experiences A and B [think of experiences
at different times here] lie in one and the same phenomenal world” and “A is
earlier than B” aspresuppositionless.
Our question, however, concerns how weexperiencethings, and not how