Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/215

 thinkers, still persist in audaciously maintaining the contrary, for the benefit of their old woman's philosophy. I am not a professor of philosophy, forsooth, that I need bow to the folly of others.

§ 50. Series of Reasons and Consequences.
According to the law of causality, the condition is itself always conditioned, and, moreover, conditioned in the same way; therefore, there arises a series in infinitum a parte ante. It is just the same with the Reason of Being in Space : each relative space is a figure ; it has its limits, by which it is connected with another relative space, and which themselves condition the figure of this other, and so on throughout all dimensions in infinitum. But when we examine a single figure in itself, the series of reasons of being has an end, because we start from a given relation, just as the series of causes comes to an end if we stop at pleasure at any particular cause. In Time, the series of reasons of being has infinite extension both a parte ante, and a parte post, since each moment is conditioned by a preceding one, and necessarily gives rise to the following. Time has therefore neither beginning nor end. On the other hand, the series of reasons of knowledge—that is, a series of judgments, each of which gives logical truth to the other—always ends somewhere, i.e., either in an empirical, a transcendental, or a metalogical truth. If the reason of the major to which we have been led is an empirical truth, and we still continue asking why, it is no longer a reason of knowledge that is asked for, but a cause—in other words, the series of reasons of knowing passes over into the series of reasons of becoming. But if we do the contrary, that is, if we allow the series of reasons of becoming to pass over into the series of reasons of knowing, in order to bring it to an end, this is never brought