METAPHYSICS. 52$ airless space? what weight in empty space? what fusi- bility without fire ? — they are each and all relative. Since being excludes negation of every kind, the quality of the existent must be absolutely simple and unchatigeahle ; it brooks no manifoldness, no quantity, no distinctions in degree, no becoming ; all this were a corruption of the purely affirmative or positive character of being. The existent is unextended and eternal. The Eleatics are to be praised because the need of escaping from the contradic- tions in the world of experience led them to make them- selves masters of the concept of being without relation and without negation, and of the simple, homogeneous quality of the existent in its full purity. But while the Eleatics conceived the existent as one, the atomists made an advance by assuming a plurality of reals. The truly one never becomes a plurality ; plurality is given, hence an original plurality must be postulated. Herbart character- izes his own standpoint as qualitative atomism, since his reals are differentiated by their properties, not by quantita- tive relations (size and figure). The idealists and the pan- theists make a false use of the tendency toward unity which, no doubt, is present in our reason, when they maintain that true being must be one. There is absolutely noth- ing in the concept of being to forbid us to think the existent as many ; while the world of phenomena, with its many things and their many properties, gives irre- fragable grounds which compel us to this conclusion. Hence, according to Herbart, the true reality is a (very large, though not, it is true, an infinite*) plurality of supra- sensible (non-spatial and non-temporal) reals, or, according to the Leibnitzian expression, monads, which all their life have nothing further to do than to preserve intact against disturbances the simple quality in which they consist (for the existent is not distinct from its quality ; it does not have the quality, but is the quality). Each thing has but one response for the most varied influences: it answers all suggestions from without by affirming its what, by con-
- Herbart writes (Text-book of Introduction to Philosophy, p. 156), quite in
the ancient manner: "The real cannot be infinite. Infinity is a predicate for thought-entities, with whose construction we are never done."
