It is easy to understand why Kant wanted to believe that man’s ideas of space and time were a priori: in other words were knowledge which the mind possessed without the need to rely on experience of the outside world. He wanted a firm foundation for his Critique of Pure Reason; and then his powerful intellect would be able to deduce incontrovertible truths in its exploration of the attitude of mind, which had such a firm foundation. We all hanker after certainty. Science tries to make sense of the material world, and map its “Laws” as accurately as possible. Lawyers much prefer a law which enables them to advise a client either to do something, or not do something; if the law says everything must be reasonable, you are left wondering how long is a piece of string. So Kant will have hankered after certainty too. But alas many people nowadays would dispute Kant’s premise that space and time are a priori conceptions. They would say, having had the benefit of a little science, that our idea of space begins firstly with the experience of space, principally the experience of touch and sight, and secondly it is perfected by the interpretation which the mind puts on the sense perceptions of which it is aware. These interpretations also stem from experience. And so we end up with our idea of space, which stems entirely from experience. It may be Euclid’s three-dimensional space, which was Kant’s for practical purposes; or we may be aware that there are a number of geometries, each of which gives us a different interpretation which we can put on our sense perceptions. Now that we are aware that the theory of numbers is the only knowledge which we have that certainly does not depend on experience; it is no longer convincing to suggest that space and time are a priori knowledge.
However Kant was right in thinking that any rational structure, of any kind, must be based on a firm foundation, if it is to be wholly reliable. However he did not seem able to accept that a structure based on a foundation, which was only slightly flawed, and which therefore was bound to lead to results which were only more or less true, might still be immensely worth while. The basis of the intellectual structure of my theory of consciousness is the perfectly relaxed consciousness; but one can never know for sure that relaxation is complete. In the silence of a Quaker Meeting, you can sense the silence deepening during the first fifteen minutes or so, of the hour that is spent in Meeting. In the same way there are many degrees of relaxation. How does one know, when one feels most relaxed, that it is complete relaxation; or that it is appropriate to call it the “consciousness of God”? Obviously one does not! Silence and relaxation are the medium by which men through the ages have sought inspiration; but that does not mean that inspiration will come; or that God, if he exists, is willing to speak to you.
Furthermore, to go from my perfectly relaxed consciousness into a consciousness under tension, in which a reasoned thought structure became possible, I had to make a further basic assumption. And it was, that the only beliefs a man or woman really believed were the ones they put into practice every day, day in day out, year in year out; intellectual beliefs to which the mind alone paid lip-service are so pale and shadowy in comparison that they hardly merit the name “belief” at all. In other words, if in practice one never misrepresented the evidence given in Court, and never knowingly put an interpretation on a witness’s evidence which it did not arguably bear, then one can say one believes it is worthwhile to be an honest lawyer. But if one expresses the opinion that it is quite wrong ever to misrepresent the evidence, and says this so often that one “believes it”; but every time one opens one’s mouth in front of a jury, one puts an interpretation on the evidence which is ever so slightly false, but not so blatantly that one’s opponent can object, then one believes that it is worthwhile being a dishonest lawyer. So I think there is substantial truth in my assumption; because it takes in its stride the hypocrisy that is such a frequent companion in the world of affairs.