Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/372

356 existing somehow, it must be posited as quite undetermined. As this contradiction is necessitated by our positing 'the absolute real,' so it can be avoided only by its negation. We must conclude, therefore, that because the being is such only through subjective determinations, it itself must be subjective; or because no absolutely real qualities can be ascribed to it, and that which is without qualities is identical with the not-being, so it is, as 'absolute real,' a non-being. All the grounds which compel us to posit things are only in us and are not given to us from without. We have just the same right to say that perception arises from an inner cause as from 'things in themselves.' The phenomenon contains in itself the only true being. It lies in the nature of spirit to posit the phenomenon as real. The real need not, as Herbart says it must, be posited in order that the given may have a point of contact for its validity. The phenomenon must, to be sure, depend upon a Something, but this Something lies within its borders. It lies in the nature of the spirit to posit the phenomenon as real.

Since we cannot explain how the organism, is produced by the unification of different portions of the world, we must admit that the world proceeds from it. The organism is not composite, it is one. This unity must be conceived as primordial and substantial, without antecedents and causes, whose fundamental law it is to unfold itself through time and space under the form of a living, organized body, embracing in its bounds the entire universe. Hence, it cannot be regarded as a metaphysical entity more or less distinct, or even separable from the body. D. calls it a metempirical being, transcending not only the senses and the imagination, but even the understanding itself. It is the whole of an infinite multiplicity, a whole anterior to its parts, without having any existence outside of them. In so far as this being is manifold, it enters into experience; in so far as one, it is inaccessible. What renders the explanation of life by mechanism and teleology necessary is the conception according to which space and time are two media, perfectly homogeneous, in which phenomena successively or simultaneously develop. Consider space as a multiplicity, indefinitely diffused, and you must consider the things which are in space as being also diffused and infinitely divisible. We are then compelled to compose it of an infinity of infinities, like mathematical points, which can know no other laws than those of movement. And then movement must be considered as the primordial reality from which everything proceeds, to which everything returns. Although philosophers have admitted the