252 MAN AND THE WORLD. 



cease, there Space would cease also, and the 

 question as to what is beyond is unanswerable, 

 because unmeaning and invalid. If, then, ''pure " 

 Space is an abstraction from the spatially-extended 

 reality, and if real Space is actually delimited by 

 that which fills it, viz. bodies, the resulting position 

 of affairs is, that the infinity of conceptual Space is 

 merely a trick of abstraction, which imposes upon 

 us by dint of its very simplicity. For it ceases to 

 be surprising that if we abstract from that which 

 really limits Space, the remaining abstraction, viz., 

 conceptual or ideal " Space," should have to be 

 regarded as unlimited — in idea. Only of course 

 this vice of our thought proves less than nothing 

 as to the infinity of the physical world. A similar 

 argument would dispose of the question as to the 

 infinity of real Time and as to what existed before 

 the beginning of the world, and thus the whole 

 difficulty would be shown to rest upon a miscon- 

 ception. 



§ 8. The metaphysical difficulties of the infinity 

 of Time amount to a self-contradiction, i.e., to a 

 conflict with the supreme law of human thought. 

 For the infinity of the past is regarded as limited 

 by the present, i.e., it is a completed infinity. But 

 a completed infinity is a contradiction of the very 

 conception of infinity, which consisted in the im- 

 possibility of completing the infinite by successive 

 synthesis. 



Again, the infinity of the world in Space involves 

 a hopeless contradiction of the conception of a 

 whole. For when we speak of the world or uni- 

 verse, we mean the totality of existing things. But 

 in order to attain to such a whole, it would be 

 necessary to grasp things together as a totality, and 



