ABSTRACT
In other respects, too, analogous questions arise in regard to both space and time. Thus in relation to the visual sense one has asked whether in the intuition itself the local determinations always reveal one and the same surface, so that it is only in our judgment about the real external relationships that there arise different estimations of depth-and indeed also (as for example in the Zöllner figure) of length and breadth. Similarly, one could ask whether our intuition of time manifests always one and the same temporal stretch receding from the present so that it would only be our judgment about the temporal distance of actual historical events which would vary-to the extent, indeed, that in the determination of the before and after we are induced to think also of something that is later than the present and to expect it as future. (Perhaps the latter conception is the correct one.)
9. Are the phenomena of memory of the third case repeated in intuition in the modus praesens, and are they declared to belong to the past only through judgments? Does the sensory field of time allow itself to be intuitively changed and extended just as little as the spatial field of vision? If it is right that we are capable in relation neither to the past nor to the future of enriching our original stock of temporal modi by others, but are able only to think up relations of distance arbitrarily by analogy with what is given, then from the fact that only external perception manifests a continuum of temporal modi while internal perception shows what it shows always and only with the modus praesens, there follows the impossibility of our intuitively presenting ourselves and our psychic activities other than with the modus praesens.66
