Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/449

 IDEALISM AND REALISM. 427 or realistic course of thought, which seeks to derive repres- entations from things; and the ideah'stic, which, conversely, seeks to derive being from thought. Now, no matter how consistently dogmatism may proceed (and when it does so it becomes, like the system of Spinoza, materialism and fatalism or determinism, maintaining that all is nature, and all goes on mechanically ; treats the spirit as a thing among others, and denies its metaphysical and moral inde- pendence, its immateriality and freedom), it may be shown to be false, because it starts from a false principle. Thought can never be derived from being, because it is not contained therein; from being only being can proceed, and never representation. Being, however, can be derived from thought, for consciousness is also being; nay, it is more than this, it is conscious being. And as consciousness con- tains both being and a knowledge of this being, idealismf / is superior to realism, because idealism includes the latter.'-^ as a moment in itself, and hence can explain it, though it is not explicable by it. Dogmatism makes the mistake of going beyond consciousness or the ego, and working with empty, merely formal concepts. A concept is empty when nothing actual corresponds to it, or no intuition can be sub- sumed under it (here it is to be noted that, besides sensu- ous intuition, there is an intellectual intuition also; an example is found in the ego as a self-intuiting being). Phi- losophy, indeed, may abstract and must abstract, must rise above that which is given — for how could she explain life and particular knowledge if she assumed no higher stand- point than her object? — but true abstraction is nothing other than the separation of factors which in experience always present themselves together; it analyzes empirical consciousness in order to reconstruct it from its elements, it causes empirical consciousness to arise before our eyes, it is a pragmatic history of consciousness. Such abstraction, undertaken in order to a genetic consideration of the ego, does not go beyond experience, but penetrates into the depths of experience, is not transcendent, but transcendental, and, since it remains in close touch with that which is intuitable, yields st real philosophy in contrast to all merely formal philosophy.