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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: the 'nurse of generation.' When therefore we speak of the necessity of our
ideas of space we must remember that this is a necessity which has grown up
with the growth of the human mind, and has been made by ourselves. We can
free ourselves from the perplexities which are involved in it by ascending
to a time in which they did not as yet exist. And when space or time are
described as 'a priori forms or intuitions added to the matter given in
sensation,' we should consider that such expressions belong really to the
'pre-historic study' of philosophy, i.e. to the eighteenth century, when
men sought to explain the human mind without regard to history or language
or the social nature of man.
In every act of sense there is a latent perception of space, of which we
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