Earlier thinkers had long
pondered how to make
sense of pairs of ideas that both seemed true, but resisted being
brought into a common space of understanding.

Typical of such pairs of ideas are
freedom versus determinism, or continuity versus discontinuity, or
totality versus infinity. Before
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) these
kinds of contradictory
ideas were construed usually either as evidence of an inherent
aptitude for
error in human
understanding,
or as a way in which God showed Himself to us as beyond the
comprehension of the intellect. Kant tried to use such pairs of
ideas (he called them
antinomies) to map necessary
apriori forms of mental experience.