of “substance at once conscious and material,” so that everything is for him “ensouled.” Besides, even were his protests disregarded, he would here have to give way to Dühring, on the ground of not concerning himself seriously with the philosophic foundations of materialism, but only with such of its phenomenal details as belong more especially to organic existence.
Dühring names his system the Philosophy of the Actual. This title sounds almost like a direct challenge to Hartmann, as much as to say, “No mystical Subconscious, no incognisable Background here!” And to have this really so is Dühring’s first and last endeavour. The Absolute for him is just this world of sense, taken literally as we find it; briefly and frankly, matter. As we perceive and think it, so it is — extended, figured, resistant, moving, a total of separate units collected into a figured whole, and into a uniformity of processes, by mechanical causation; in short, a variable constant, a changeless substantive whole undergoing by changeless laws ceaseless changes in form and in detail.
This striking conception of an indissoluble polar union between Permanence and Change is according to Dühring the vital nerve of the Actual, and the key to its entire philosophy.[1] But this polar
- ↑ In this he apparently presents a one-sided reflection from Hegel, with whom Identity and Difference are the elementary dynamic “moments” of the absolute Idea. But the relationship really goes back to Greek philosophy, in which Dühring seems much at home.
