the discovery of which indubitably exercised a determining influence upon
the whole course of the Kantian Critique of Reason, and which forms one of
its poles. The transcendental idealism, the distinction between phenomena
and noumena, and the limitation of knowledge to phenomena, all receive
significant confirmation from the Antithetic. Without the critical
idealism (that which is intuited in space and time, and known through
the categories, is merely the phenomenon of things, whose "in itself" is
unknowable), the antinomies would be insoluble. How is reason to act in
view of the conflict? The grounds for the antitheses are just as conclusive
as those for the theses; on neither side is there a preponderance which
could decide the result. Ought reason to agree with both parties or with
neither?

The solution distinguishes the first two antinomies, as the mathematical,
from the second two, as the dynamical antinomies; in the former, since it
is a question of the composition and division of quanta, the conditions may
be homogeneous with the conditioned, in the latter, heterogeneous. In the
former, thesis and antithesis are alike _false_, since both start from
the inadmissible assumption that the universe (the complete series of
phenomena) is given, while in fact it is only required of us (is an Idea).
The world does not exist in itself, but only in the empirical regress of
phenomenal conditions, in which we never can reach infinity and never the
limitation of the world by an empty space or an antecedent empty time, for
infinite space, like empty space (and the same holds in regard to time), is
not perceivable. Consequently the quantity of the world is neither finite
nor infinite. The question of the quantity of the world is unanswerable,
because the concept of a sense-world existing by itself _(before_ the
regress) is self-contradictory. Similarly the problem whether the composite
consists of simple elements is insoluble, because the assumption that
the phenomenon of body is a thing in itself, which, antecedent to all
experience, contains all the parts that can be reached in experience--in
other words, that representations exist outside of the representative
faculty--is absurd. Matter is infinitely divisible, no doubt, yet it does
not consist of infinitely numerous parts, and just as little of a definite
number of simple parts, but the parts exist merely in the representation
of them, in the division (decomposition), and t