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The limitations of the cosmological speculations of the Babylonians find a striking illustration in the manner in which the beginnings of human culture are placed on a level with the beginnings of heavenly and terrestrial phenomena.
The stars enter society by the light and knowledge they afford, the time they keep, and the ornament they lavish; but they are mere dead weights in their substance and cosmological puzzles in their destiny. You and I possess manifold ideal bonds in the interests we share; but each of us has his poor body and his irremediable, incommunicable dreams.
Reason allows itself to be satisfied upon insufficient grounds, with regard to the completion of this series. And so on. The aim of the cosmological argument is to avoid the necessity of proving the existence of a necessary being priori from mere conceptions a proof which must be ontological, and of which we feel ourselves quite incapable.
We have said that in all these cases the cosmological idea is either too great or too small for the empirical regress in a synthesis, and consequently for every possible conception of the understanding.
The traditions embodied in the cosmological productions, the epics and legends of Babylonia, are no doubt as much the property of the Assyrians as of their southern cousins, just as the conceptions underlying the incantation texts and the hymns and prayers and omens, though produced in the south, are on the whole identical with those current in the north.
We have thus completely before us the dialectical procedure of the cosmological ideas. No possible experience can present us with an object adequate to them in extent. Nay, more, reason itself cannot cogitate them as according with the general laws of experience. And yet they are not arbitrary fictions of thought.
We know that this idea of the materiality of the firmament found elaborate expression in those later cosmological guesses which were to dominate the thought of Europe until the time of Newton. We need not doubt, therefore, that for the Egyptian this solid vault of the heavens had a very real existence.
And certainly, if we regarded infinite Being as a cosmological medium say, empty space and time there would be a miraculous break, an unaccountable new beginning, if that glassy expanse was suddenly wrinkled by something called energy. But in fact there need never have been such a leap, or such a miracle, because there could never have been such a transition.
I mentioned above that this cosmological argument contains a perfect nest of dialectical assumptions, which transcendental criticism does not find it difficult to expose and to dissipate. I shall merely enumerate these, leaving it to the reader, who must by this time be well practised in such matters, to investigate the fallacies residing therein.
It holds up improvement as at least possible; whereas determinism assures us that our whole notion of possibility is born of human ignorance, and that necessity and impossibility between them rule the destinies of the world. Free-will is thus a general cosmological theory of PROMISE, just like the Absolute, God, Spirit or Design.
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