Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 2.djvu/118

108, and the antithesis as the. I shall not, however, accommodate myself here with reference to such small, narrow, and perverse minds; and, giving honour not to them, but to the truth, I shall show that the proofs which Kant adduced of the individual theses are sophisms, while those of the antitheses are quite fairly and correctly drawn from objective grounds. I assume that in this examination the reader has always before him the Kantian antinomy itself.

If the proof of the thesis in the first conflict is to be held as valid, then it proves too much, for it would be just as applicable to time itself as to change in time, and would therefore prove that time itself must have had a beginning, which is absurd. Besides, the sophism consists in this, that instead of the beginninglessness of the series of states, which was at first the question, suddenly the endlessness (infinity) of the series is substituted; and now it is proved that this is logically contradicted by completeness, and yet every present is the end of the past, which no one doubted. The end of a beginningless series can, however, always be thought, without prejudice to the fact that it has no beginning; just as, conversely, the beginning of an endless series can also be thought. But against the real, true argument of the antithesis, that the changes of the world necessarily presuppose an infinite series of changes backwards, absolutely nothing is advanced. We can think the possibility that the causal chain will some day end in an absolute standstill, but we can by no means think the possibility of an absolute beginning.