4^o. _Moral necessity_, in virtue of which, every human being, every animal even, is _compelled_, as soon as a motive presents itself, to do that which alone is in accordance with the inborn and immutable character of the individual. This action now follows its cause therefore as infallibly as every other effect, though it is less easy here to predict what that effect will be than in other cases, because of the difficulty we have in fathoming and completely knowing the individual empirical character and its allotted sphere of knowledge, which is indeed a very different thing from ascertaining the chemical properties of a neutral salt and predicting its reaction. I must repeat this again and again on account of the dunces and blockheads who, in defiance of the unanimous authority of so many great thinkers, still persist in audaciously maintaining the contrary, for the benefit of their old woman's philosophy. I am not a professor of philosophy, forsooth, that I need bow to the folly of others. § 50. _Series of Reasons and Consequences._ According to the law of causality, the condition is itself always conditioned, and, moreover, conditioned in the same way; therefore, there arises a series _in infinitum a parte ante_. It is just the same with the Reason of Being in Space: each relative space is a figure; it has its limits, by which it is connected with another relative space, and which themselves condition the figure of this other, and so on throughout all dimensions _in infinitum_. But when we examine a single figure in itself, the series of reasons of being has an end, because we start from a given relation, just as the series of causes comes to an end if we stop at pleasure at any particular cause. In Time, the series of reasons of being has infinite extension both _a parte ante_, and _a parte post_, since each moment is conditioned by a preceding one, and necessarily gives rise to the following. Time has therefore neither beginning nor end. On the other hand, the series of reasons of knowledge--that is, a series of judgments, each of which gives logical truth to the other--always ends somewhere, _i.e._, either in an empirical, a transcendental, or a metalogical truth. If the reason of the major to which we have been led is an empirical truth, and we still continue asking _why_, it is no longer a reason of knowledge that is asked for, but a cause--in other words, the series of reasons of knowing passes over into the series of reasons of becoming. But if we do the contrary, that is, if we allow the series of reasons of becoming to pass over into the series of reasons of knowing, in order to bring it to an end, this is never brought about by the nature of the thing, but always by a special purpose: it is therefore a trick, and this is the sophism known by the name of the Ontological Proof. For when a cause, at which it seems desirable to stop short in order to make it the _first_ cause, has been reached by means of the Cosmological