But the most serious blow for the Kantian theory was the discovery of noneuclidean geometry, a consistent theory developed from a set of axioms differing from that of elementary geometry only in this respect that the parallel axiom was replaced by its negative. For this showed that the phenomena usually described in the language of elementary geometry may be described with equal exactness, though frequently less compactly in the language of non-euclidean geometry; hence it is not only impossible to hold that the space of our experience has the properties of elementary geometry but it has no significance to ask for the geometry which would be true for the space of our experience. It is true that elementary geometry is better suited than any other to the description of the laws of kinematics of rigid bodies and hence of a large number of natural phenomena, but with some patience it would be possible to make objects for which the kinematics would be more easily interpretable in terms of non-euclidean than in terms of euclidean geometry.
However weak the position of intuitionism seemed to be after this period of mathematical development, it has recovered by abandoning Kant’s apriority of space but adhering the more resolutely to the apriority of time. This neo-intuitionism considers the falling apart of moments of life into qualitatively different parts, to be reunited only while remaining separated by time as the fundamental phenomenon of the human intellect, passing by abstracting from its emotional content into the fundamental phenomenon of mathematical thinking, the intuition of the bare two-oneness. This intuition of two-oneness, the basal intuition of mathematics, creates not only the numbers one and two, but also all finite ordinal numbers, inasmuch as one of the elements of the two-oneness may be thought of as a new two-oneness, which process may be repeated indefinitely; this gives rise still further to the smallest infinite ordinal number ω. Finally this basal intuition of mathematics, in which the connected and the separate, the continuous and the discrete are united, gives rise immediately to the intuition of the linear continuum, i. e., of the “between,” which is not exhaustible by the interposition of new units and which therefore can never be thought of as a mere collection of units
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