om appearance seems to be torn away, or at
any rate to reveal itself as a curtain. Kant shows that, if we were to
take this world as it lies before us for the true reality, we should land
in inextricable contradictions. These contradictions show that the true
world itself cannot coincide with our thought and comprehension, for in
being itself there can be no contradictions. Otherwise it would not exist.
The ancient problems of philosophy, from the time of the Eleatic school
onwards, find here their adequate formulation. Kant's disciple, Fries, has
carried the matter further, and has attempted to develop what for Kant
still remained a sort of embarrassment of reason to more precise
pronouncements as to the relation of true being to its manifestation,

The Antimony of Our Conception of Time.

A few examples may serve to make the point clear. The first of the
antinomies is also the most impressive. It brings before us the
insufficiency of our conceptions of time, and shows the impossibility of
transferring, from the world as it appears to us, to real Being any mode
of conceiving time which we possess. The difficulty is, whether we are to
think of our world as having had a beginning or not. The naive outlook
will at once assume without further ado a beginning of all things.
Everything must have had a beginning, though that may have been a very
long time ago. But on more careful reflection it is found impossible to
imagine this, and then the assumption that things had no beginning is made
with as little scruple. Let us suppose that the beginning of things was
six thousand, or, what is quite as easy, six thousand billion years ago.
We are at once led to ask what there was the year before or many years
before, and what there was before that again, and so on until we face the
infinite and beginningless. Thus we find that we have never really thought
of a beginning of things, and never could think of it, but that our
thinking always carries us into the infinite. Time, at any rate, we have
thought of as infinite. We may then amuse ourselves by trying to conceive
of endless time as empty, but we shall hardly be able to give any reason
for arriving at that idea. If time goes back to infinity, it seems
difficult to see why it should not always have been filled, instead of
only being so filled from some arbitrary point. And in any case the very
fact of the existence of time makes the problem of beginning or not
beginning inso