Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/188

Rh transmission, and consciousness, while remaining self-converse, becomes self-converse in which the process of the world is reënacted.

Not only do we reach in this way the reality of knowledge, but we discover at the same time the ground for the occurrence of contradictions in it, and the principles of a dialectic that will solve them. This Natural Dialectic, proceeds Dühring in his treatise with that title, moves in the following manner. Knowledge, though identical with the Actual in contents, differs from it in form; it is, in fact, just the translation of these contents from the form of object into that of subject, from the form of being into that of knowing. Now, a leading trait of this subjectivity is its sense of possibility — of the power to use the active synthesis that works in Nature, and that now in mind works as the secret of its thinking, with an indefinite freedom. In short, it possesses imagination. As a consequence, it falls under the illusion of the false-infinite (Spinoza’s infinitum imaginationis), and assumes that the principles of its logical synthesis — space, time, and causation — are as infinite in the object-world as they ever appear to be in itself. But to suppose causation, time, and space to be really infinite would strip the Actual of the quality of an absolute, and thus annul reality altogether.