anticipation--are contradictory in themselves and opposed to each
other: so truly is this the case that on every question the
economist finds himself continually placed between an affirmation
and a negation alike irrefutable. ANTINOMY, in fine, to use a
word sanctioned by modern philosophy, is the essential
characteristic of political economy; that is to say, it is at
once its death-sentence and its justification.

ANTINOMY, literally COUNTER-LAW, means opposition in principle
or antagonism in relation, just as contradiction or ANTILOGY
indicates opposition or discrepancy in speech. Antinomy,--I ask
pardon for entering into these scholastic details, comparatively
unfamiliar as yet to most economists,--antinomy is the conception
of a law with two faces, the one positive, the other negative.
Such, for instance, is the law called ATTRACTION, by which the
planets revolve around the sun, and which mathematicians have
analyzed into centripetal force and centrifugal force. Such also
is the problem of the infinite divisibility of matter, which, as
Kant has shown, can be denied and affirmed successively by
arguments equally plausible and irrefutable.

Antinomy simply expresses a fact, and forces itself imperatively
on the mind; contradiction, properly speaking, is an absurdity.
This distinction between antinomy (contra-lex) and contradiction
(contra-dictio) shows in what sense it can be said that, in a
certain class of ideas and facts, the argument of contradiction
has not the same value as in mathematics.

In mathematics it is a rule that, a proposition being proved
false, its opposite is true, and vice versa. In fact, this is