  The last two sentences in the above quote suggest that, (a) Weyl  embraces something close to Kant’s position, according to which space and time are “a priori forms of appearances”, or that (b) Weyl adheres to a position called spacetime  substantivalism, according to which, in addition to body and  fields and their relations, there also exists a  ‘container’, the spacetime manifold, and this manifold,  its points and the manifold differential-topological relations are  physically real. However, this interpretation would contradict Weyl’s basic thesis that in the symbolic construction of the objective word  we are left with nothing but symbolic arithmetic functional  relations. Weyl’s phrases, do not denote either a physically real  container or something like Kant’s a priori form of  intuition. They merely denote a conceptual or formal  scaffolding, a logical space, as it were, whose points  are represented by purely formal coordinates \((n\)-tuple of pure numbers). It is such a formal space which is employed by the  theorist in the initial stages of constructing an objective world. To emphasize, in modelling the objective world the theorist begins by  constructing a formal scaffold which consists of mere  symbols and formal coordinates, without explaining initially what the symbols for mass, charge, field strength, etc., mean; only toward the end does the theorist describe how the symbolic structure connects  directly with experience ((Weyl, 1948, 311)). 