ABSOLUTE IDEALISM 91 



all appearances, it is dependent not only upon the stimuli and 

 distractions of the outer world, but upon the condition of the 

 nervous mechanism. In the third place, the concept of soul- 

 substance had itself, with Kant, fallen under suspicion. That 

 of material substance had at least found a new excuse for being 

 in the doctrine of the conservation of mass. But among the 

 observable qualities or contents of the soul there is no such 

 constant factor nothing beyond the empty abstraction by which 

 its manifold ideas are subsumed under the identity of one con 

 sciousness. 



The reader will surely understand that the above is not to be 

 taken as a presentation of the very arguments by which Hegel 

 was led to the doctrine of the essentiality of relations. What 

 we have wished to show is that apart from the peculiar forms 

 of the critical philosophy the doctrine which reduced the es 

 sential attributes of eternal substances to the mutual determina 

 tions of phenomena was a characteristic manifestation of the 

 spirit of the age. We have already described Kant s attitude 

 upon the matter how, clinging to the old logic, while he ushers 

 in the new, he still conceives of a self-subsistent substance lying 

 behind the phenomenal substance, though there remains no deter 

 mination with which he can identify it. In Hegel s system, that 

 dualism has been left behind. It is now recognized, that in the 

 concept of reciprocity rationalism has found its refutation. That 

 the thing-in-itself is unknowable has become a truism, for there 

 is nothing in it to know. The real thing is wholly determined in 

 all its qualities by its relations to other things. More truly 

 than Leibniz had conceived, every reality is a mirror of the 

 universe not by reason of a preestablished harmony, the work 

 of a transcendent creator, but simply because that is what its 

 existence means. Essence and accident, the inner and the outer 

 have coalesced. The actual is no longer to be sought for beside 

 or behind the phenomenon. If the distinction between them is 

 not to be abandoned, it must be radically transformed. 



