| Moral philosophy can always exhibit its principles, with their practical consequences, in concreto--at least in possible experiences, and thus escape the mistakes and ambiguities of abstraction. |
| But transcendental propositions, which lay claim to insight beyond the region of possible experience, cannot, on the one hand, exhibit their abstract synthesis in any a priori intuition, nor, on the other, expose a lurking error by the help of experience. |
| Transcendental reason, therefore, presents us with no other criterion than that of an attempt to reconcile such assertions, and for this purpose to permit a free and unrestrained conflict between them. |
| And this we now proceed to arrange.* |
| [*Footnote; The antinomies stand in the order of the four transcendental ideas above detailed.] |
| FIRST CONFLICT OF THE TRANSCENDENTAL IDEAS. |
| THESIS. |
| The world has a beginning in time, and is also limited in regard to space. |
| PROOF. |
| Granted that the world has no beginning in time; up to every given moment of time, an eternity must have elapsed, and therewith passed away an infinite series of successive conditions or states of things in the world. |
| Now the infinity of a series consists in the fact that it never can be completed by means of a successive synthesis. |
| It follows that an infinite series already elapsed is impossible and that, consequently, a beginning of the world is a necessary condition of its existence. |
| And this was the first thing to be proved. |
| As regards the second, let us take the opposite for granted. |
| In this case, the world must be an infinite given total of coexistent things. |
| Now we cannot cogitate the dimensions of a quantity, which is not given within certain limits of an intuition,* in any other way than by means of the synthesis of its parts, and the total of such a quantity only by means of a completed synthesis, or the repeated addition of unity to itself. |
| Accordingly, to cogitate the world, which fills all spaces, as a whole, the successive synthesis of the parts of an infinite world must be looked upon as completed, that is to say, an infinite time must be regarded as having elapsed in the enumeration of all co-existing things; which is impossible. |
| For this reason an infinite aggregate of actual things cannot be considered as a given whole, consequently, not as a contemporaneously given whole. |
| The world is consequently, as regards extension in space, not infinite, but enclosed in limits. |
| And this was the second thing to be proved. |
| [*Footnote; We may consider an undetermined quantity as a whole, when it is enclosed within limits, although we cannot construct or ascertain its totality by measurement, that is, by the successive synthesis of its parts. |