In this he is inconsistent and undermines the whole antinomy. For he in effect identifies transcendental freedom, which moves to achieve purposes, motives, or final causes, with passive things and events caused by other things or events. According to this, there would be no collision or antinomy, of course. But the alternative open to him or to us is to admit transcendental freedom as a settled fact of experience; but not of external experience pure and simple, and this too would solve his antinomy. It is an immediate fact of internal experience and an inferred or mediated fact of external experience. We know first the ego, with the maximum of certainty; secondly, we know by, inference from analogy, selfhood, or self-determination, in plants, animals, and our fellow-men, interpreting their movements and changes by aid of our inward experience.
IV. Sir William Hamilton's Law of the Conditioned.—Better known in England and America than Kant's Antinomy is Sir William Hamilton's Law of the Conditioned. It is enounced by him in the form of an antinomy. We can know only the conditioned. Our attempt to know the unconditioned leads us into two contradictory theses, both of which seem necessary. Space is the example given. Space is not bounded, because its bounds would require space to exist in and thus posit space beyond the bounds, thus continue or affirm space instead of negate or limit it. On the other hand, try to realize, comprehend, or, better, imagine space as a whole, and we are completely baffled, inasmuch as we always find space beyond the frame of our mental picture, and our imagination finally sinks exhausted in the attempt.
Here we have a more easily solved antinomy than those of Kant. For it is evident at first glance that the thesis to Hamilton's antinomy, namely, the proposition that space is infinite, is proved, while the antithesis, namely, the proposition that space is finite, is not sustained. Space is infinite, because all boundaries or limits would require space to exist in and hence affirm instead of negate space; space is therefore only continued by its environment, and thus infinite. But imagination or mental representation cannot picture what is
