The World as Will and Idea, Vol. II — Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Haldane & Kemp

the complete sum of the conditions from which the succeeding state, the effect, proceeds.

For the completeness of the determinations present together in the state which is the cause, the argument now substitutes the completeness of the series of causes by which that state itself was brought to actuality; and because completeness presupposes the condition of being rounded off or closed in, and this again presupposes finiteness, the argument infers from this a first cause, closing the series and therefore unconditioned.

But the juggling is obvious. In order to conceive the state A. as the sufficient cause of the state B., I assume that it contains the sum of the necessary determinations from the co-existence of which the estate B. inevitably follows.

Now by this my demand upon it as a sufficient cause is entirely satisfied, and has no direct connection with the question how the state A. itself came to be; this rather belongs to an entirely different consideration, in which I regard the said state A. no more as cause, but as itself an effect; in which case another state again must be related to it, just as it was related to B.

The assumption of the finiteness of the series of causes and effects, and accordingly of a first beginning, appeal* nowhere in this as necessary, any more than the presentness of the present moment requires us to assume a beginning of time itself.

It only comes to be added on account of the laziness of the speculating individual That this assumption lies in the acceptance of a cause as a sufficient reason is thus unfairly arrived at and false, as I have shown at length above when considering the Kantian principle of pure reason which coincides with this thesis.

In illustration of the assertion of this false thesis, Kant is bold enough in his observations upon it to give as an example of an unconditioned beginning his rising from his chair ; as if it were not just as impossible for him to rise without a motive as for a ball to roll without a cause. I certainly do not need to prove the baselessness of the appeal which, induced by a sense ol

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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 nave also repeatedly reconstructed it; while nearly all Kant's other doctrines have been contested, and indeed :here have never been wanting some perverse minds ffhich rejected even the transcendental aesthetic. The mdivided assent which the antinomy, on the other hand, las met with may ultimately arise from the fact that certain persons regard with inward satisfaction the point it which the understanding is so thoroughly brought to 1 standstill, having hit upon something which at once is ind is not, so that they actually have before them here the ixth trick of Philadelphia in Lichtenberg's broadsheet.

If we examine the real meaning of Kant's Critical Soluion of the cosmological problem which now follows, we ind that it is not what he gives it out to be, the solution >f the problem by the disclosure that both sides, starting rom false assumptions, are wrong in the first and second VOL. 11. h

H4 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.

conflicts, and that in the third and fourth both are rig] It is really the confirmation of the antitheses by the explanation of their assertions.