Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/74

 of philosophy been doing in behalf of their dearly beloved Cosmological Proof, since Kant dealt it the death blow in his Critique of Pure Reason? — they, who prize truth above everything. They were, indeed, at their wits ends, for — as these worthies well know, though they do not say so — causa prima is, just as well as causa sui, a contradictio in adjecto, albeit the former expression is more generally used than the latter. It is besides usually pronounced with a very serious, not to say solemn, air; nay, many people, especially English Reverends, turn up their eyes in a truly edifying way when they impressively and emphatically mention that contradictio in adjecto: the first cause. They know that a first cause is just as inconceivable as the point at which Space ends or the moment when Time first began. For every cause is a change, which necessarily obliges us to ask for the preceding change that brought it about, and so on in infinitum, in infinitum! Even a first state of Matter, from which, as it has ceased to be, all following states could have proceeded, is inconceivable. For if this state had in itself been the cause of the following ones, they must likewise have existed from all eternity, and the actual state existing at the present moment could not have only just now come into being. If, on the other hand, that first state only began to be causal at some given period, something or other must have changed it, for its inactivity to have ceased; but then something must have occurred, some change must have taken place; and this again obliges us to ask for its cause i.e. a change which preceded it; and here we are once more on the causal ladder, up which we are whipped step by step, higher and higher, in infinitum, in infinitum! (These gentlemen will surely not have the face to talk to me of Matter itself arising out of nothing! If so, they will find corollaries at their service further on.) The causal law therefore is not so