(2) _The time-series_. I am incompetent to pronounce an opinion on the validity of such arguments as Lord Kelvin's. But, however we decide this question, there will still remain the further and harder question, 'Is the series of all events or experiences, physical or psychical (not merely the particular series which constitutes our physical Universe), to be thought of as finite or infinite? On the one hand it involves a contradiction to talk of a time-series which has a beginning: a time which has no time before it is not time at all; any more than space with an end to it would be space. On the other hand, we find equally, or almost equally, unthinkable the hypothesis of an endless series of events in time: a series of events, which no possible enumeration of its members will make any smaller, presents itself to us as unthinkable, directly we regard it as expressing the true nature of a positive reality, and not as a mere result of mathematical abstraction. Here then we are presented with an antinomy--an apparent contradiction in our thought--which we can neither avoid nor overcome. It is one of the classical antinomies recognized by the Kantian Philosophy--the only one, I may add, which neither Kant himself nor any of his successors has done anything to attenuate or to remove. {91} Kant's own attempted solution of it involved the impossible supposition that the past has no existence at all except in so far as it is thought by some finite mind in the present. The way out of this difficulty which is popular with post-Kantian Idealists is to say that God is Himself out of time, and eternally sees the whole series at once. But, in the first place, that does not get over the difficulty: even if God does see the whole series at once, He must see it either as limited or as endless, and the old antinomy breaks out again when we attempt to think either alternative. And secondly, when you treat a temporal series as one which is all really present together--of course it may all be _known_ together as even we know the past and the future--but when you try to think of God as contemplating the whole series as really present altogether, the series is no longer a time-series. You have turned it into some other kind of series--practically (we may say) into a spacial series. You have cut the knot, instead of unravelling it. I have no doubt that the existence of this antinomy does point to the fact that there is some way of thinking about time from which the difficulty disappears: but we are, so far as I can see, incompetent so to resolve it. Philosophers resent the idea of an insoluble problem. By all means let them go on trying to solve it. I can only say that I find no difficulty in showing the futility {92} of any solution of the time-difficulty which I have so far seen. For the present at least--I strongly suspect for ever--we must acquiesce on this matter in a reverent Agnosticism. We can show the absurdity of regarding