he does not argue, that there is a space, a time, and a causal progression distinct from the thoughts to which we give those names — an assumption which he may have hoped to warrant by establishing afterwards a mechanical transit from mere vitality to consciousness. From any serious attempt at establishing such a transit, however, his clear insight into the limitation of the “persistence of force” prevented him from making.
But, as with other partial philosophies, it is in the practical sphere that the self-contradiction in his principle shows at its worst. This principle compels him at the outset of his ethics to set up the supreme authority of the Whole, but its lack of ethical substance brings him at the end to bare individualism. At first we feel as if he had failed to draw from it the high consequences of which it seemed capable. Why, we say, should he sink from the stern ethics of devotion to the Whole into this wretched atomism of private caprice? But we have here the genuine drift of his scheme; for real morality is impossible on a pessimistic basis, and Dühring’s principle, in spite of his subtle and imaginative plea for it, is optimistic only by illusion. The very Whole which he makes the ground and the sovereign object of our duty is in fact but a monstrous Power, whose self-centred “Final Purpose” is the burial of the moral life, while yet only on its threshold, in a
