principle in Hartmann’s theory — the undertaking to construe the absolute with the categories of the relative, to think the eternal in relations of time and space and motion.
It is a notable merit in Dühring that he himself, and with no light emphasis, lays down the principle here implied; but his conception of absolute being forces him fatally to contradict it. He will have the chain of causation once on a time begin. But a beginning is necessarily a point in time, and a point in time is necessarily related to a before as well as to an after. Dühring consequently finds it impossible even to state his beginning of change without referring it to a supposed rest preceding it; in no other way can he make room for a continuous mechanical nexus in the whole of his Actual. The Actual is thus necessarily brought wholly under time; time and causation are carried back, whether or no, into “Being and identity,” and Dühring is asserting in one breath that the absolute is not subject to relative categories, and yet is so. After his scruples about time and causation, it is remarkable that he manifests no hesitancy in applying space to his absolute. He maintains real space to be finite, and thus annuls his absolute once more. For so, his total Actual has a limited extent; but an extent, like a beginning, must be defined by something other than itself, is unthinkable except
