Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 2.djvu/123

Rh weakness, he makes to the philosophers of antiquity, by quoting from Ocellus Lucanus, the Eleatics, &c., not to speak of the Hindus. Against the proof of this antithesis, as in the case of the previous ones, there is nothing to advance.

The fourth conflict is, as I have already remarked, really tautological with the third; and the proof of the thesis is also essentially the same as that of the preceding one. His assertion that every conditioned presupposes a complete series of conditions, and therefore a series which ends with an unconditioned, is a petitio principii, which must simply be denied. Everything conditioned presupposes nothing but its condition; that this is again conditioned raises a new consideration which is not directly contained in the first.

A certain appearance of probability cannot be denied to the antinomy; yet it is remarkable that no part of the Kantian philosophy has met so little contradiction, indeed has found so much acceptance, as this exceedingly paradoxical doctrine. Almost all philosophical parties and text-books have regarded it as valid, and have also repeatedly reconstructed it; while nearly all Kant's other doctrines have been contested, and indeed there have never been wanting some perverse minds which rejected even the transcendental æsthetic. The undivided assent which the antinomy, on the other hand, has met with may ultimately arise from the fact that certain persons regard with inward satisfaction the point at which the understanding is so thoroughly brought to a standstill, having hit upon something which at once is and is not, so that they actually have before them here the sixth trick of Philadelphia in Lichtenberg's broadsheet.

If we examine the real meaning of Kant's Critical Solution of the cosmological problem which now follows, we find that it is not what he gives it out to be, the solution of the problem by the disclosure that both sides, starting from false assumptions, are wrong in the first and second