Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/606

590 Together they form a complex, an immanent unity subsisting by mutual dependence. Herbart's notion of an absolute positing is self-contradictory — as posited, the object would be in us, and as absolute, it would be quite apart from us. It is just as if we should say that the table is in the room and not in it at the same time. The truth of knowledge is dependent only on its agreement with the laws of the understanding. These laws fully satisfy our feeling of conviction and impulse to know. The concept is developed into the judgment by subjecting itself to the identity of the self. The equality of the concept with itself is only the objectified expression of the identity of the self. Since knowledge is possible only through categories, and that, too, only when the categories form an immanent unity with the identity of the self, and since the identity of the self involves the relativity of its object, all knowledge, and so the entire world-picture, is only subjective. This applies not only to things, but to selves. All spirits are only in my spirit — every self is only a phenomenal form of my self. The moral order of the world is a necessary form of evolution of the absolute self. In monism, to which I hold, God would be the absolute self, over against whom stand all individual selves as his phenomena. He is not an absolute-real, but an absolute-ideal essence.

It is the constant progress in the organic, and especially in the psychical sphere, which has led the author to doubt the constancy of the sum of energy in the universe as a whole. His own thesis is that "the sum of the real forces, i.e. those which are understood in the law of the conservation of energy, are not constant, but steadily increasing in the course of the world's history. The thing, however, which furnishes this supply is an unknown and indefinite existence, which we cannot indeed name nothing, but yet we are not in a position to say anything further of it."

In the lives of plants, animals, and men we constantly see new properties and relations arise, and those already existing becoming stronger, without being able to explain these through any existing sum of forces. Living organisms do not simply react like machines upon one invariable stimulus, but respond purposively to the most varied forms of excitement. The organisms, too, become modified, and when these modifications become permanent as a result of them, a higher stage of life is made possible. Nothing is more common than to speak of 'natural forces' and to forget that the bases of these forces are themselves indefinite and unknown. We constantly see organic beings,