"I thought that the simulacrum (appearance) of Time and Space in the Thought World could easily be brought into contemplation with your sublime theory." Also Mendelssohn in his letter to Kant, Dec. 23, 1770, regarding time says:
"Time is, according to Leibnitz, a phenomenon, and has, like all phenomena, something objective and something subjective."
Kant has, moreover, touched upon the problem in the Dissertation (i.e., the Inaugural Dissertation on the Two Worlds: 1770). He asks outright in § 16:
quonam pricipio ipsa haec relatio omnium substantiarum nitatur, quae intuitive spectato vocatur spatium?
To what seems to us spatium there corresponds then an ipsa substantiarum relatio. He answers this subtilis quaestio thus: that the connection of all appearances in space is a reflection (Gegenbild) of the connection of all substances in the primal Being, "ideoque spatium, quod est conditio universalis et necessaria compraesentiae omnium sensitive cognita, dici potest omnipraesentia (sic) phenomenon (Scholion 22)." "Therefore Space, which is the universal and necessary condition of the united presence of all things, sensitively known, may be called omnipresence as phenomenon, or the phenomenal omnipresence . . . ."[1] Still Kant is unwilling to enter
- ↑ Kant's Dissertation was produced in 1770. It was about the year 1769 that Swedenborg wrote in Canones Novae Ecclesiae the doctrine that space and time are not forms of things in themselves, but by correspondence there is such relationship (between
