ABSTRACT
Like time, space is another "form" of our experience: this time our "outer experience." Some objects of our experience are invariably represented spatially; we call them "physical bodies." Although our sensory experiences are obtained serially - the glimpse of a nose appearing before the glimpse of an eye and the sensation of touching a hand - they contribute to our awareness of complex objects spread out three-dimensionally in space. Our consciousness of space is not something we abstract from foreign, incoming data, for those data are not three-dimensional: what we experience as three-dimensional is the result of our pre-conscious synthesizing activity, and our a priori contribution to experience is exhibited there. If we mentally subtract from our experiential representation of a body the features our understanding contributes to it (its substantial unity and divisibility) and the features contributed by sensation (color and hardness, for example) we will be left with its "extension and figure" - the portion of three-dimensional space that it occupies. Our awareness of this three-dimensional reality is "pure," not empirical; it is present in our experience as our own formal contribution.
