Consequently, an absolute cosmical limit is empirically, and therefore absolutely, impossible. The reader will remark that the proof presented above is very different from the dogmatical demonstration given in the antithesis of the first antinomy. And this is the proper and only use which reason can make of its principles. The above rule does not prescribe an unceasing regress in one kind of phenomena. It does not, for example, forbid us, in our ascent from an individual human being through the line of his ancestors, to expect that we shall discover at some point of the regress a primeval pair, or to admit, in the series of heavenly bodies, a sun at the farthest possible distance from some centre.
Every beginning is in time, and all limits to extension are in space.
But space and time are in the world of sense. Consequently phenomena in the world are conditionally limited, but the world itself is not limited, either conditionally or unconditionally. For this reason, and because neither the world nor the cosmical series of conditions to a given conditioned can be completely given, our conception of the cosmical quantity is given only in and through the regress and not prior to it- in a collective intuition. But the regress itself is really nothing more than the determining of the cosmical quantity, and cannot therefore give us any determined conception of it- still less a conception of a quantity which is, in relation to a certain standard, infinite.