the results of the latest natural science. This we can do by insisting, first, on a strict observance of the limits the Critique assigned to knowledge, and, secondly, on defining these more exactly, in accordance with the mechanical nature of sensation. In fact, we here arrive at the true import and value of materialism; for that the actual of experience is only explicable on mechanical principles is the clear outcome of the latest science, with which it only remains to set our theory of knowledge into agreement, in order at one stroke to give materialism its due, and yet its quietus as a scheme of interpreting the absolute.
For the world of actual experience, extended, moving, interacting in all its parts, and transmitting energy from part to part under the universal law of the “persistence of force,” is from beginning to end simply our conscious presentation (Vorstellung). The derivation of mind from actual matter is therefore impossible, as it would involve the absurdity of the object’s producing the subject whose testimony is the sole evidence that there is any object.[1] And as for hypothetical matter — a conjectural substrate beneath the actual — that is shut out of the ques-
- ↑ This seems, at a single happy stroke, to dispose of the attempt, common to Schopenhauer, Hartmann, and Dühring, to explain consciousness as a phenomenon arising from the earlier and more real existence of the object, or “matter.”
