Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/499

PHILOSOPHICAL TERMINOLOGY. 485 oftener enters into phenomena as pure negation without understanding. In its right understanding it is a necessary evolution of the Rationalism which knows itself and the limits of its own power. Its progress within objective natu- ral science is marked by the deeper study of the processes of life. But as philosophical inferences, in which it describes its curves, the following demand recognition : (1) The exist- ence for a deductive thought of the infinite previous to the finite, which enables us also to think of unity before the manifold, of the universal before the particular, of the whole before its parts. (2) The predominance and victory Motion Rest of the ideas Change over the ideas Identity Becoming Being. For rationalistic thought the victorious ideas are indeed in- dispensable ; but they are conceived of as being added from without. The state of rest, etc., is the natural, as in a con- structed machine, say in a clock which has not yet been wound up, a comparison which is used by almost all these thinkers. The impulse must be given to matter from with- out, since every part receives it from another ; here the system demands its Deus as the originator of motion, of change, of becoming. The other mode of thought, which we may begin by regarding as the empirical, accepts matter in motion as the fact of facts, and does not trouble itself about the old concept according to which motion does not belong to the " essence " of matter. Impenetrable atoms and their ap- propriate empty spaces are for it only auxiliary ideas, however necessary they may be for rational thought. Here lies also the point where the doctrine of the conservation and trans- formation of energy breaks the old form of the mechanical system. (3) As in the conservative system of the universe the total amount of energy maintains itself while its forms continually change, so the totality of a living organism main- tains itself as the persistence of the relations of its parts throughout the continuous change of the parts. Life is at the same time reproduction and destruction ; it exists, there- fore, together with the tendency to its opposite, for which reason Bichat defines it as the fight against death, and another French physiologist, Claude Bernard, ventures upon the dialectical proposition " La vie c'est la mort ". (4) Thus the reality of every moment or any limited portion of time, carries in it as its negation the real possibility, inclination, tendency, disposition, power or capability, or whatever we may call it, to all following moments ; possibility is therefore in no way an object of thought alone, but it is reality itself