Meanwhile, the Monadists have been subtle enough to
escape from this difficulty, by presupposing intuition and the
dynamical relation of substances as the condition of the possibility
of space, instead of regarding space as the condition of the
possibility of the objects of external intuition, that is, of
bodies. Now we have a conception of bodies only as phenomena, and,
as such, they necessarily presuppose space as the condition of all
external phenomena. The evasion is therefore in vain; as, indeed, we
have sufficiently shown in our Aesthetic. If bodies were things in
themselves, the proof of the Monadists would be unexceptionable.
The second dialectical assertion possesses the peculiarity of having
opposed to it a dogmatical proposition, which, among all such
sophistical statements, is the only one that undertakes to prove in
the case of an object of experience, that which is properly a
transcendental idea- the absolute simplicity of substance. The
proposition is that the object of the internal sense, the thinking
Ego, is an absolute simple substance. Without at present entering upon
this subject- as it has been considered at length in a former chapter-
I shall merely remark that, if something is cogitated merely as an
object, without the addition of any synthetical determination of its
intuition- as happens in the case of the bare representation, I- it is
certain that no manifold and no composition can be perceived in such a
representation.
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