ABSTRACT
The construction of intuitive reality begins when the continuous flow of the same series of sensible phenomena begins to divide. Descartes’ analysis of the concept of space is closely linked with his analysis of the concept of substance. Descartes’ rationalist theory of space and Berkeley’s empiricist theory form, however, only the initial prelude to a wealth of speculative, psychological, and epistemo-critical theories that successively appeared in the thinking of the nineteenth century. The intuition of space that is worked out and laid down in language is the clearest indication of the distinctive twofold relation. The progress from merely pragmatic space to objective space, from the space of action to the space of intuition, while not completed, is at least determined and anticipated in its general principle. Our empirical intuition of space, however, goes back to a constant skilled act of “selection”, and this selection always requires a certain principle of selection, a determining viewpoint.
