In the second conflict the thesis is at once guilty of a very palpable _petitio principii_, for it commences, “Every _compound_ substance consists of simple parts.” From the compoundness here arbitrarily assumed, no doubt it afterwards very easily proves the simple parts. But the proposition, “All matter is compound,” which is just the point, remains unproved, because it is simply a groundless assumption. The opposite of simple is not compound, but extended, that which has parts and is divisible. Here, however, it is really tacitly assumed that the parts existed before the whole, and were brought together, whence the whole has arisen; for this is the meaning of the word “compound.” Yet this can just as little be asserted as the opposite. Divisibility means merely the possibility of separating the whole into parts, and not that the whole is compounded out of parts and thus came into being. Divisibility merely asserts the parts _a parte post_; compoundness asserts them _a parte ante_. For there is essentially no temporal relation between the parts and the whole; they rather condition each other reciprocally, and thus always exist at the same time, for only so far as both are there is there anything extended in space. Therefore what Kant says in the observations on the thesis, “Space ought not to be called a _compositum_, but a _totum_,” &c., holds good absolutely of matter also, which is simply space become perceptible. On the other hand, the infinite divisibility of matter, which the antithesis asserts, follows _a priori_ and incontrovertibly from that of space, which it fills. This proposition has absolutely nothing against it; and therefore Kant also (p. 513; V. 541), when he speaks seriously and in his own person, no longer as the mouthpiece of the αδικος λογος, presents it as objective truth; and also in the “Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science” (p. 108, first edition), the proposition, “Matter is infinitely divisible,” is placed at the beginning of the proof of the first proposition of mechanics as established truth, having appeared and been proved as the fourth proposition in the Dynamics. But here Kant spoils the proof of the antithesis by the greatest obscurity of style and useless accumulation of words, with the cunning intention that the evidence of the antithesis shall not throw the sophisms of the thesis too much into the shade. Atoms are no necessary thought of the reason, but merely an hypothesis for the explanation of the difference of the specific gravity of bodies. But Kant himself has shown, in the dynamics of his “Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science,” that this can be otherwise, and indeed better and more simply explained than by atomism. In this, however, he was anticipated by Priestley, “On Matter and Spirit,” sect. i. Indeed, even in Aristotle, “Phys.” iv. 9, the fundamental thought of this is to be found.