Now if
one thinks that there could be no understanding and obeying the
order without a previous teaching, one thinks of the teaching as
supplying a
reason for doing what one did; as supplying
the road one walks. Now there is the idea that if an order
is understood and obeyed there must be a reason for our obeying it
as we do; and in fact, a chain of reasons reaching back to
infinity. This is as if one said:
“Wherever you are, you must have got there from
somewhere else, and to that previous place from another place; and
so on ad infinitum”. (If, on the
other hand, you had said, “wherever you are, you
could have got there from another place ten yards away;
and from that other place from a third, ten yards further away, and
so on ad infinitum”, what then you would have
stressed would have been the infinite
possibility of
making a step. Th
us
23.
the idea of an infinite
chain of reasons arises out of a confusion similar to
this:– that a line of a certain length consists of an
infinite number of parts because it is in
definitely
divisible; i.e. because there is no end to
the possibility of dividing it.)