Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/260

 intellectual one, thought has already passed beyond the world of sense, and transferred itself to another sphere, without having found it necessary to endeavour to pass beyond the world of sense by using first of all the category of causality. Then, again, this intellectual conception of the contingent is supposed to be incapable of producing a synthetic proposition such as is involved in the idea of causality. As a matter of fact, however, it has to be shown that the finite passes through itself, through what it is meant to be, through its own content, to its Other, to the Infinite itself; and this is what forms the basis of a synthetic proposition according to Kant’s use of the term. The nature of the contingent is of a similar kind. It is not necessary to take the category of causality as referring to the Other into which contingency passes over; on the contrary, this Other is, to begin with, the absolute necessity, and is consequently Substance also. The relation of substantiality, however, is itself one of those synthetic relations which Kant refers to as the categories, and this just means that “the purely intellectual characteristic of the contingent”—for the categories are essentially the characteristic qualities of thought—gives rise to the synthetic principle of substantiality, so that if we posit contingency we posit substantiality as well. This principle which expresses an intellectual relation, and is a category, is certainly not employed here in an element which is heterogeneous, namely, in the world of sense, but, on the contrary, in the intellectual world, which is its natural home. If it had no defect otherwise, it might, in fact, be applied with absolute justice in that sphere in which we are concerned with God, who can be conceived of only in thought and in Spirit, and this in opposition to its employment in the sensuous element, which is foreign to it.

The second fundamental fallacy to which Kant directs attention (p. 637) is that contained in arguing from the impossibility of there being an infinite series of successive