“If it were right to overstep a little the limits of apodictic certainty befitting metaphysics, it would seem worth while to trace out some things pertaining not merely to the laws but even to the causes of sensuous intuition, which are only intellectually knowable. Of course the human mind is not affected by external things, and the world does not lie open to its insight infinitely, except as far as itself together with all other things is sustained by the same infinite power of one. Hence it does not perceive external things but by the presence of the same common sustaining cause; and hence space, which is the universal and necessary condition of the joint presence of everything known sensuously, may be called the phenomenal omnipresence, for the cause of the universe is not present to all things and everything, as being in their places, but their places, that is the relations of the substances, are possible, because it is intimately present to all. Furthermore, since the possibility of the changes and successions of all things whose principle as far as sensuously known resides in the concept of time, supposes the continuous existence of the subject whose opposite states succeed; that whose states are in flux, lasting not, however, unless sustained by another; the concept of time as one infinite and immutable in which all things are and last, is the phenomenal eternity of the general cause} But it seems more cautious to hug the shore of the cognitions granted to us by the mediocrity of our intellect than to be carried out upon the high seas of such mystic investigations, like Malebranche, whose opinion that we see all things in God is pretty nearly what has here been expounded.”

Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Section IV On The Principle Of The Form Of The Intelligible World

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German philosopher 1724–1804

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