Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/190

Rh part propositions contradicting the foregoing, is an illusion arising from neglect of the differences between object and subject. Subjective space, time, and causation have, to be sure, a quasi-infinity; yet our authentic thought, even about them, dissolves this illusion, and agrees with reality, as soon as the understanding brings its dialectic to bear. Here, then, concludes Dühring, the whole Kantian fog-bank of “antinomies” is explained and scattered. One series of Kant’s pairs of counter-judgments is entirely true; the other comes from the false-infinite, and is the work of the imagination, uncritically mistaken by Kant for the understanding.

From this point onward, then, the metaphysics of the Actual may freely proceed. The Actual as absolute, as to its veritable Being, is eternal; time and causation apply, not to its inmost existence, but only to its processional changes. Nevertheless, this differentiation is just as necessarily involved in its nature as its abiding identity. The system of changes called the sensible world must accordingly, at some instant or other, have strictly begun. Thenceforward the Actual, poured in its entirety into these changes, moves in a gradually varying, many-branching Figure, whose elementary components are of constant dimensions and number, but whose shape is undergoing incessant alteration, giving rise, from epoch to epoch, to forms of