CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 109
With reference to the spatial limits of the world, it is proved that, if it is to he regarded as a given whole, it must necessarily have limits. The reasoning is correct, only it was just the first link of it that was to be proved, and that remains unproved. Totality presupposes limits, and limits presuppose totality; but here both together are arbitrarily presupposed. For this second point, however, the antithesis affords no such satisfactory proof as for the first, because the law of causality provides us with necessary determinations only with reference to time, not to space, and affords us a priori the certainty that no occupied time can ever be bounded by a previous empty time, and that no change can be the first change, but not that an occupied space can have no empty space beside it. So far no a priori decision on the latter point would be possible; yet the difficulty of conceiving the world in space as limited lies in the fact that space itself is necessarily infinite, and therefore a limited finite world in space, however large it may be, becomes an infinitely small magnitude; and in this incongruity the imagination finds an insuperable stumbling-block, because there remains for it only the choice of thinking the world either as infinitely large or infinitely small. This was already seen by the ancient philosophers: (
Greek characters) (Metrodorus, caput scholæ Epicuri, absurdum ait, in magno campo spicam unam produci, et unum in infinito mundum) Stob. Eel., i. c. 23. Therefore many of them taught (as immediately follows), (Greek characters) (infinitos mundos in infinito). This is also the sense of the Kantian argument for the
nights have also 1000. His year has 365 days and as many nights, He lives 100 of his years, always creating; and if he dies, at once a new Brahma is born, and so on from eternity to eternity. The same relativity of time is also expressed in the special myth which is quoted in Polier's work, vol. ii. p. 594, from the Puranas. In it a Rajah, after a visit of a few seconds to Vishnu in his heaven, finds on his return to earth that several millions of years have elapsed, and a new age has begun; for every day of Vishnu is 100 recurrences of the four ages.
