draws the weighty inference in the last chapter of this Book, that nothing indivisible, no mere point can move. And with this conclusion Kant's definition of Matter, as "that which moves in Space," completely harmonizes.
This law of the continuity and gradual taking place of all changes which Aristotle was thus the first to lay down and prove, we find stated three times by Kant: in his "Dissertatio de mundi sensibilis et intelligibilis forma," § 14, in the "Critique of Pure Reason,"[1] and finally in his "Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science."[2] In all three places his exposition is brief, but also less thorough than that of Aristotle; still, in the main, both entirely agree. We can therefore hardly doubt that, directly or indirectly, Kant must have derived these ideas from Aristotle, though he does not mention him. Aristotle's proposition—ούκ ἔστι ἀλλήλων ἐχόμενα τὰ νύν ("the moments of the present are not continuous")—we here find expressed as follows: "between two moments there is always a time," to which may be objected that "even between two centuries there is none; because in Time as in Space, there must always be a pure limit."—Thus Kant, instead of mentioning Aristotle, endeavours in the first and earliest of his three statements to identify the theory he is advancing with Leibnitz' lex continuitatis. If they really were the same, Leibnitz must have derived his from Aristotle. Now Leibnitz [3] first stated this Loi de la continuité in a letter to Bayle. [4] There, however, he calls it Principe de l'ordre général, and gives under this name a very general, vague, chiefly geometrical argumentation, having no direct bearing on the time of change, which he does not even mention.
- ↑ Kant, "Krit. d. r. Vern." 1st edition, p. 207; 5th edition, p. 253. (English translation by M. Müller, p. 182.)
- ↑ Kant, "Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft. End of the "Allgemeine Anmerkung zur Mechanik."
- ↑ According to his own assertion, p. 189 of the "Opera philos." ed. Erdmann.
- ↑ Ibid. p. 104.
