Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/498

 484 FEBDINAND TONNIES : subjects (not only from the thinker himself), and the with- drawal of all sensuous qualities is therefore as it were granted. The thought which is connected with intuition or what is the same thing, pure experience must also correct with energy the mathematical understanding. It says to it, as it were, "You see in the world nothing but similar processes, which repeat themselves from eternity according to the rules which you call natural laws ; you see in it nothing but discrete atoms, which combine and part, attract and repel each other ; these views of yours are very useful and so far correct ; but if you will only forget all your plans and pur- poses you will allow that you know your matter only as a continuum, and that you as well as I are forced to posit its magnitude or extension as infinite, and therefore as defying all measurement ; further you must allow that in experience there are no completely similar events ; and that the existence of the universe is given to us only as one single process, which we can compare as a whole with no other. You believe that the constantly repeated revolution of the planets around their axes and around the sun were ordained from all eternity and would endure to all eternity ; but with your own resources we have found that the genesis of these planets and of the sun from the undistinguished unity of glowing masses of gas is a unique event, which we may indeed explain in detail by the known laws of nature, but cannot derive as a total effect from some total antecedent cause, because it points back to unascertainable earlier world- processes in infinitum. In the same way the cooling of the crust of the earth and the development of organic life upon it are events which have nothing like them, and which cannot therefore be understood in the same way as events which repeat themselves similarly under sufficiently like conditions, or can even be reproduced artificially at pleasure. If the transformations of energy in the universe tend predominantly to the production of heat, while heat always passes over from warmer to cooler bodies and so tends to distribute itself equally, if then entropie strives to a maximum and the total state to the cessation of kinetic energy, as of all forms of energy except heat, we must accept this predictable history of the universe, like its past history, as a simple fact, the explanation of which is nothing more than its differently expressed description." 75. We see in fact, throughout the whole of the present century, how investigation and reflexion combine in a criticism of the mechanical Rationalism, which leaves it untouched in a higher thought; though that criticism