luble. For such reasons Aristotle asserted that the world
had no beginning, and rejected the contrary idea as childish.

But the idea of no beginning is also childish or rather impossible, and in
reality inconceivable. For if it be assumed that the world and time have
never had a beginning, there stretches back from the time at which I now
find myself a past eternity. It must have passed completely as a whole,
for otherwise this particular point in time could never have been arrived
at. So that I must think of an infinity which nevertheless comes to an
end. I cannot do this. It would be like wooden iron.

The matter sounds simple but is nevertheless difficult in its
consequences. It confronts us at once with the fact, confirmed by the
theory of knowledge, that time as we know it is an absolutely necessary
and fundamental form of our conceptions and knowledge, but is likewise the
veil over what is concealed, and cannot be carried over in the same form
into the true nature of things. As the limits and contradictions in the
time-conception reveal themselves to us, there wakes in us the idea which
we accept as the analogue of time in true being, an idea of existence
under the form of "eternity," which, since we are tied down to temporal
concepts, cannot be expressed or even thought of with any content.(2)

The Antimony of the Conditioned and the Unconditioned.

The antinomy of the conditioned and the unconditioned leads us along
similar lines. Every individual finite thing or event is dependent on its
causes and conditions, which precede it or co-exist in inter-relation with
it. It is conditioned, and is only possible through its conditions. But
that implies that it can only occur or be granted when all its conditions
are first given in complete synthesis. If any one of them failed, it would
not have come about. But every one of its conditioning circumstances is in
its turn conditioned by innumerable others, and every one of these again
by others, and so on into the infinite, backwards and on all sides, so
that here again something without end and incapable of end must have come
to an end, and must be thought of as having an end, before any event
whatever can really come to pass. But this again is a sheer impossibility
for our thinking: we require and must demand something completed, because
now is really now, and something happens now, and yet in the world as it
appears to us we are always forced to face what cann