Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/306

290 mechanical significance. "Definite," "coherent," "heterogeneous," when applied merely to modes of the "redistribution of matter and motion," of which alone science is cognizant, can denote only the most external relations, and have no reference to the inner essence of nature. The term "concrete individual," expressing that at which evolution in the philosophical sense arrives in the highest forms of nature, represents a whole which is not a mere mechanical aggregate, however "definite," "coherent," and "heterogeneous," but is organic and embodies in a manner a self-determining, or self-realizing notion, an inner spiritual force, manifesting itself in material form.

The "scientific" view of the constitution of matter is characterized by the same abstract mechanicalness as are the "scientific" doctrines of the conservation of energy and of the evolution of natural phenomena or orders of being. The doctrine of mere science regarding the constitution of matter is, briefly, that ultimately it is composed of and owes its properties to infinitesimal, indivisible, eternal, dead particles, called atoms, vibrating in infinitesimal spaces, movement being imparted to the atoms by impact from without. For philosophy, eternity and absoluteness in the atom are inadmissible because utterly irreconcilable with the dependence of all things upon the synthetic activity of thought: the atom can be at most only an ideal centre of force in an otherwise perfect continuum of being; instead of being merely inert and individual, it is essentially active and in organic relation with all other atoms. In short, the constitution of matter is a concrete, dynamical, not an abstract, mechanical constitution; it is not something, as it were, foreign to and impervious to thought, but thought-determined, thought-governed.

In the examples just now considered — and in general — philosophy seeks a closer unity than science (instinctively) aims at, since it refers all objects to the highest principle of being and knowledge, viz. the ultimate unity of self-consciousness, whereas science seeks only the unity of the "given" as given, or as passively apprehended. But philosophy also regards all unity or identity as a unity or identity of things opposed or different, i.e. as a concrete unity. Science — and in this partly lies its