Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/397

THE ANTINOMIES. 375 we need not, for that reason, regard them as erroneous, for the opposite is as little susceptible of demonstration. The whole question belongs not in the forum of knowledge, but in the forum of faith, and that which we gain by the proof that nothing can be determined concerning it by theoretical reasoning (viz., assurance against materialistic objections) is far more valuable than what we lose. (2) The Antifiomies of Ratiojial Cosmology. If in its endeavor to spin metaphysical knowledge concerning the nature of the spirit and the existence of the soul after death out of the concept of the thinking ego the reason falls into the snare of an ambiguous ter?nmus mediiis, the difficulties which frustrate its attempts to use the Idea of the world in the extension of its knowledge a priori are of quite a different character. Here the formal correctness of the method of inference is not open to attack. It may be proved with absolute strictness (and in the apagogical or indirect form, from the impossibility of the contrary) that the world has a beginning in time, and also that it is limited in space ; that every compound substance con- sists of simple parts ; that, besides the causality according to the laws of nature, there is a causality xox^ freedom^^^ and that an absolutely necessary Being exists, either as a part of the world or as the cause of it. But the contrary may be proved with equal stringency (and indirectly, as before) : ' The world is infinite in space and time; there is nothing simple in the world; there is no freedom, but everything in the world takes place entirely according to the laws of na- ture; and there exists no absolutely necessary Being either within the world or without it. This is the famous doctrine of the conflict of the four cosmological theses and antith- eses or of the Antinomy of Pure Reason, the discovery of which indubitably exercised a determining influence upon the whole course of the Kantian Critique of Reason, and which forms one of its poles. The.Jtxaiis€€fld.eiital ideal- ism, the distinction between phenomena and noumena, and the limitation of knowledge to phenomena, all receive sig- niKcant confirmation from the Antithetic. Without the critical idealism (that which is intuited in space and time, and known through the categories, is merely the plienom-