Page:Our knowledge of the external world.djvu/172

 “The world has no beginning and no limits in space, but is infinite in respect of both time and space.” Kant professes to prove both these propositions, whereas, if what we have said on modern logic has any truth, it must be impossible to prove either. In order, however, to rescue the world of sense, it is enough to destroy the proof of one of the two. For our present purpose, it is the proof that the world is finite that interests us. Kant’s argument as regards space here rests upon his argument as regards time. We need therefore only examine the argument as regards time. What he says is as follows:

“For let us assume that the world has no beginning as regards time, so that up to every given instant an eternity has elapsed, and therefore an infinite series of successive states of the things in the world has passed by. But the infinity of a series consists just in this, that it can never be completed by successive synthesis. Therefore an infinite past world-series is impossible, and accordingly a beginning of the world is a necessary condition of its existence; which was the first thing to be proved.”

Many different criticisms might be passed on this argument, but we will content ourselves with a bare minimum. To begin with, it is a mistake to define the infinity of a series as “impossibility of completion by successive synthesis.” The notion of infinity, as we shall see in the next lecture, is primarily a property of classes, and only derivatively applicable to series; classes which are infinite are given all at once by the defining property of their members, so that there is no question of “completion” or of “successive synthesis.” And the word “synthesis,” by suggesting the mental activity of synthesising, introduces, more or less surreptitiously, that reference to mind by which all Kant’s philosophy was infected. In the second place, when Kant says that