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236 good. The hero may appear as prophet, poet or statesman; but he always represents great, concentrated energy of life, and his words and deeds reveal the hidden ideas of the movement of life. Such heroes are especially necessary for the solution of the social problem. Carlyle was one of the first authors, who—in opposition to the then dominant school of political economy—noted the existence of this problem. He made no specific investigations. Empirical science was too distasteful to him for that.

3. In the same year (1829) that James Mill published his Analysis, the most important work of the associationist psychology, William Hamilton's profound treatise on The Philosophy of the Unconditioned likewise appeared, in which he severely criticized all philosophy that treated the unconditioned as an object of knowledge. Hamilton (1788-1856) spent a number of years in fruitful professorial activity at the university of Edinburgh.— Whatever we apprehend and conceive—by the very fact of its apprehension and conception—is related to something else, by which it is limited and conditioned. To think is to condition. We neither conceive an absolute whole, nor an absolute part; each whole is a part, and each part is a whole. We only know the conditioned finite. We define whatever we know in terms of space, time and degree (extensively, protensively and intensively) and even the law of causality is likewise nothing more than a special form of the law of relativity. Hamilton regards the principle of causality as the expression of our incapacity to conceive an absolute addition of reality. On account of this incapacity we try to conceive the new (as effect) as a new form of the old (as cause). If cause and effect should fail to fully correspond to each other, we should be compelled to assume an absolute beginning of the new. Hence,