an infinite series can “never” be completed by successive synthesis, all that he has even conceivably a right to say is that it cannot be completed in a finite time. Thus what he really proves is, at most, that if the world had no beginning, it must have already existed for an infinite time. This, however, is a very poor conclusion, by no means suitable for his purposes. And with this result we might, if we chose, take leave of the first antinomy.
It is worth while, however, to consider how Kant came to make such an elementary blunder. What happened in his imagination was obviously something like this: Starting from the present and going backwards in time, we have, if the world had no beginning, an infinite series of events. As we see from the word “synthesis,” he imagined a mind trying to grasp these successively, in the reverse order to that in which they had occurred, i.e. going from the present backwards. This series is obviously one which has no end. But the series of events up to the present has an end, since it ends with the present. Owing to the inveterate subjectivism of his mental habits, he failed to notice that he had reversed the sense of the series by substituting backward synthesis for forward happening, and thus he supposed that it was necessary to identify the mental series, which had no end, with the physical series, which had an end but no beginning. It was this mistake, I think, which, operating unconsciously, led him to attribute validity to a singularly flimsy piece of fallacious reasoning.
The second antinomy illustrates the dependence of the problem of continuity upon that of infinity. The thesis states: “Every complex substance in the world consists of simple parts, and there exists everywhere nothing but the simple or what is composed of it.” The antithesis states: “No complex thing in the world consists of
