LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 125 



the distilled result of all the sciences, its method 

 and organon must be identical with theirs. The 

 method is hypothesis, verified by experimental in- 

 duction and criticised by thought. The organon 

 is the imagination checked by the understanding, 

 and the understanding checked by dialectic. The 

 imagination gives us the requisite hypotheses ; the 

 understanding tests and settles their rival claims, 

 dialectic purging it from the illusory contradictions 

 into which it naturally runs when facing the prob- 

 lems of ultimate reality. These problems all con- 

 cern the notion of infinity, either in the form of 

 the infinitely great or the infinitely small; and the 

 contradictions, seemingly unavoidable, to which they 

 give rise, are in truth, says Diihring, mere illusions, 

 springing from the lack of a First Principle that 

 has genuine reality. These contradictions, he con- 

 tinues, formed the basis of Kant's boasted dialec- 

 tic, by which he is thought to have exposed the 

 illusion hiding in our very faculties. Kant would 

 have it that these contradictions issue from the 

 inmost nature of the understanding itself, when 

 it presumes to grapple with things as they are ; but 

 their appearance in the form of his famous "anti- 

 nomies " was in fact owing to his imperfect concep- 

 tion of the origin of knowledge, and his consequent 

 falsification of Nature into a mere phenomenon. 

 With this assertion, Diihring confronts Kant's 



