50 AGNOSTICISM. 



objects in Space and Time, which cannot involve 

 infinity, be denied, the whole antithesis vanishes. 

 For infinity in thought is quite compatible with 

 actual finitude. 



With regard to the origin of the world in Time, 

 Kant's difficulty, like Spencer's about the First 

 Cause (§ lo), applies only to an absolute beginning 

 of all things. If nothing originally existed, nothing 

 can have come into' being. But if something existed 

 eternally, that something may at some point have 

 caused the existence of our world. There is in 

 fact a third alternative to the infinite existence of 

 the world and its beginning in empty Time. For 

 though the world cannot have come into existence 

 in Time, it may perfectly well have done so with 

 Time. Time and our phenomenal world may be 

 correlated conditions of our present dispensation. 

 This is a possibility which Kant should have 

 noticed and considered, all the more that it is as 

 old as Plato, who in the Timseus (38 B) calls Time 

 the moving image of Eternity, and that it has been 

 adopted by the majority of thinkers who have con- 

 sidered the question of creation seriously, e.g., by 

 St. Augustine, who says, Non est factus mundus in 

 tempore, sed cum tempore} 



§ 21. Lastly, we must consider Kant's attack 

 upon the old rational psychology, which professed 

 to derive from the substantiality of the Self or Soul 

 its immateriality, incorruptibility, personality, im- 

 mortality, etc. And with regard to the a priori 

 proofs of rational psychology, Kant may be admitted 

 to have made out his case.^ The simplicity of the 



1 "The world was not made in Time, but together with Time." 



2 Jhus he shows that the immortality cannot be inferred from 

 the simplicity of the soul : for though the simple cannot be dis- 

 solved into its component parts, it may yet be annihilated by 

 evanescence. 



