48 AGNOSTICISM. 



in passing how Kant could arrive at his extra- 

 ordinary confidence that if he could only get outside 

 himself and see his Self, it would appear to be a 

 composite patchwork of various substances ! Does 

 he imagine that if he could see his soul it would 

 be his soul ? And even if he could see it, and see 

 that it was composite, it would yet, on his own 

 principles, be a fallacy to infer the multiplicity of 

 the (noumenal) subject from that of its (pheno- 

 menal) appearance. It may be that our idea of 

 the unity of the soul requires modification ult- 

 imately, but it can hardly be denied that our con- 

 sciousness of the oneness of our Self is xh^ prima 

 facie basis of our assertion of the unity of substance. 



Lastly, his first antinomy deals with the limits of 

 the world an Space and Time. The thesis main- 

 tains that the world must have limits in Space and 

 in Time; it must have had a beginning in Time 

 and must come to an end in Space, because of the 

 conflict between the conceptions of infinity and of 

 a whole. An infinite whole is an impossibility, 

 because its infinity consists just in the fact that it 

 cannot be completed. Time, therefore, without 

 beginning, is a contradiction in terms, for past Time 

 is infinite, and yet limited by the present. An 

 infinite world in Space, on the other hand, is no 

 world at all, i.e., it can never be completed and 

 treated as a whole. 



The antithesis argues that limits to the world in 

 Space and Time are unthinkable. For did they 

 exist, they would imply in the world a relation to 

 empty Space and empty Time, i.e., relations to 

 nonentities, and hence contradictions. We can 

 never conceive limits to Space, but our thought 

 must ever stray beyond any imagined limit, and 



