| The second proposition of the antithesis--that there exists in the world nothing that is simple--is here equivalent to the following; The existence of the absolutely simple cannot be demonstrated from any experience or perception either external or internal; and the absolutely simple is a mere idea, the objective reality of which cannot be demonstrated in any possible experience; it is consequently, in the exposition of phenomena, without application and object. |
| For, let us take for granted that an object may be found in experience for this transcendental idea; the empirical intuition of such an object must then be recognized to contain absolutely no manifold with its parts external to each other, and connected into unity. |
| Now, as we cannot reason from the non-consciousness of such a manifold to the impossibility of its existence in the intuition of an object, and as the proof of this impossibility is necessary for the establishment and proof of absolute simplicity; it follows that this simplicity cannot be inferred from any perception whatever. |
| As, therefore, an absolutely simple object cannot be given in any experience, and the world of sense must be considered as the sum total of all possible experiences; nothing simple exists in the world. |
| This second proposition in the antithesis has a more extended aim than the first. |
| The first merely banishes the simple from the intuition of the composite; while the second drives it entirely out of nature. |
| Hence we were unable to demonstrate it from the conception of a given object of external intuition (of the composite), but we were obliged to prove it from the relation of a given object to a possible experience in general. |
| OBSERVATIONS ON THE SECOND ANTINOMY. |
| THESIS. |
| When I speak of a whole, which necessarily consists of simple parts, I understand thereby only a substantial whole, as the true composite; that is to say, I understand that contingent unity of the manifold which is given as perfectly isolated (at least in thought), placed in reciprocal connection, and thus constituted a unity. |
| Space ought not to be called a compositum but a totum, for its parts are possible in the whole, and not the whole by means of the parts. |
| It might perhaps be called a compositum ideale, but not a compositum reale. |
| But this is of no importance. |
| As space is not a composite of substances (and not even of real accidents), if I abstract all composition therein--nothing, not even a point, remains; for a point is possible only as the limit of a space--consequently of a composite. |
| Space and time, therefore, do not consist of simple parts. |
| That which belongs only to the condition or state of a substance, even although it possesses a quantity (motion or change, for example), likewise does not consist of simple parts. |
| That is to say, a certain degree of change does not originate from the addition of many simple changes. |
| Our inference of the simple from the composite is valid only of self-subsisting things. |
| But the accidents of a state are not self-subsistent. |
| The proof, then, for the necessity of the simple, as the component part of all that is substantial and composite, may prove a failure, and the whole case of this thesis be lost, if we carry the proposition too far, and wish to make it valid of everything that is composite without distinction--as indeed has really now and then happened. |
| Besides, I am here speaking only of the simple, in so far as it is necessarily given in the composite--the latter being capable of solution into the former as its component parts. |