these things exists either now, or at some time, or usually, or always. And so we encounter them directly in time. Kant, who did not primarily orient his analysis in this fashion, failed to see that time determines the things of the environment just as originally as space does. In his theory, time determines things out there in the environment only mediately, and it determines them immediately only as the givens of inner sense (parallel to the way space determines them immediately only as the things of the environment). This thesis of Kant’s is phenomenologically wrong—it collides with what is immediately found in the given. And Kant has to accept this state of affairs, despite his theory, even if he does so after the fact, as when he says that time is the universal form of the encountered manifold both of outer and of inner sense. Therefore, from the beginning, spatial and temporal determinateness reside in the known of natural-scientific knowledge, regardless of what the content of that known may be.
But what is known by natural science—namely, nature—is, insofar as it is known, something expressed, something determined in propositions. Whatever this entity nature may be, every statement of this science already posits and presupposes determinate propositions that are the basis of (and that are explicitly or implicitly co-asserted in) every natural-scientific judgment. These propositions are the fundamental principles that express what underlies every determinate change within nature as a change within nature. Laws of nature do not regulate just this or that specific process in nature. They determine nature in general as nature. Those propositions are the Analogies of Experience:
[First Analogy:] Principle of the persistence of substance: In all changes of appearances, substance persists, and its [316] quantum is neither increased nor diminished in nature. (B 224)[Second Analogy:] Principle of temporal sequence according to the law of causality: All alterations occur in accordance with the law of the connec-tion of cause and effect. (B 232)[Third Analogy:] Principle of simultaneity, according to the law of in-teraction, or community: All substances, insofar as they can be perceived in space as simultaneous, are in thoroughgoing interaction. (B 256)
(I will not go into the question of why Kant calls these principles “analogies.”)72
These principles contain determinate basic concepts. For example, in the Second Analogy—the principle of temporal sequence according to the law of causality—we find concepts like “cause” and “effect,” or more
72. [See Kant, Reflexionen, no. 4675.]