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Updated: September 19, 2025
An antinomy is made up of two terms, necessary to each other, but always opposed, and tending to mutual destruction. I hardly dare to add, as I must, that the first of these terms has received the name thesis, position, and the second the name anti-thesis, counter-position. This method of thought is now so well-known that it will soon figure, I hope, in the text-books of the primary schools.
They have been wrong in esteeming that they were then only saved of God or Christ when they were saved by an obviously external process. Even this antinomy is softened when one no longer holds that God and men are mutually exclusive conceptions. It is God working within us who saves, the God who in Jesus worked such a wonder of righteousness and love as else the world has never seen.
So that in this system, which is that of Destutt de Tracy, Montesquieu, and Plato, the antinomy of division, like that of value, is without solution.
To harmonically establish this two-faced principle and solve this antinomy, society evokes a second, soon to be followed by a third; and such will be the progress of the social genius until, having exhausted all its contradictions, supposing, though it is not proved, that there is an end to contradiction in humanity, it shall cover with one backward leap all its previous positions and in a single formula solve all problems.
But neither contradiction nor antinomy, which analysis discovers at the bottom of every simple idea, is the principle of truth.
The effects of this struggle are well-known: the wars of commerce and of the market; obstructions to business; stagnation; prohibition; the massacres of competition; monopoly; reductions of wages; laws fixing maximum prices; the crushing inequality of fortunes; misery, all these result from the antinomy of value.
That is to say, our objections not be ontological, but must be directed against the causal connection with a series of phenomena of a condition which is itself unconditioned. In one word, they must be cosmological and relate to empirical laws. The reader will observe in this antinomy a very remarkable contrast.
Thus the antinomy of pure reason in its cosmological ideas disappears.
To bring our examples to a conclusion, we find the same sort of antinomy in regard to space, and the world as it is extended in space. Here, too, it becomes apparent that space as we imagine it, and as we carry it with us as a concept for arranging our sense-impressions, cannot correspond to the true reality.
For the Philistine captain and his "We," Kantian philosophy does not exist. He does not dream of the fundamental antinomy of idealism and of the highly relative sense of all science and reason. And it is precisely reason that ought to tell him how little it is possible to know of things in themselves.
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