dly strut about the streets in a coarse smock of
abusive language, quite unconcernedly, without any suspicion of their
unsuitable attire.

Well, I shall endeavour to be as fair as I can to my unknown opponents and
friends, the coarse as well as the courteous. I cannot be coarse myself,
much as it seems to be desired in some quarters that I should. Each one
must determine for himself what is specially meant for him.

I cannot of course enter into all the objections that have been made. Many
have very little or nothing to do with what lay nearest the Horseherd's
heart. The antinomies, for example, on the infinity of space and time,
have long since belonged to the history of metaphysics, and have been so
thoroughly worked out by Kant and his school that there is hardly anything
new to be said about them. In the question about the age of our world, we
need only distinguish between world as universe and world as our world,
that is, as the earth or the terrestrial world. A beginning of the world
as universe is of course incomprehensible to us; but we may speak of the
beginning of the earth, especially of the earth as inhabited by man,
because here, as Lord Kelvin has shown, astronomical physics and geology
have enabled us to fix certain chronological limits, and to say how old
our earth may be, and no older or younger. When I said of the world, that
though it were millions of years old, there still was a time before it was
one year or 1897 years old, I referred to the world in the sense of our
world, that is, the earth. Of the world as universe this would scarcely be
said; on the contrary, we should here apply the axiom that every boundary
implies something beyond, _i.e._ an unbounded, until we arrive at the
region where, as people say, the world is nailed up with boards. Many
years ago I tried to prove that our senses can never perceive a real
boundary, be it on the largest or the smallest scale; they present to us
everywhere the infinite as their background, and everything that has to do
with religion has sprung out of this infinite background as its ultimate
and deepest foundation. Instead of saying that by our senses we perceive
only the finite or limited, I have sought to show (_On the Perception of
the Infinite_) that we everywhere perceive the unlimited, and that it is
we, and not the objects about us, that draw the boundary lines in our
perceptions. When I also called this unknown omnipresence of the infinite
the sour