LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 131 



which is to purge our understanding of its subjec- 

 tive illusions. Exactly as the Law of Sufficient 

 Reason^ must limit itself, as we just now saw, by 

 the real and higher Law of Causation, so that the 

 universe-process may strictly begin, so must the 

 other subjective logical principle, the Law of Con- 

 tradiction,^ be construed not to exclude, but to in- 

 clude, the Law of Natural Antagonism ; otherwise 

 the Mechanics of Nature would be impossible. 



The three laws teach us, too, not only to recognise 

 the presence of continuity throughout existence, 

 but how to interpret it with precision, and not to 

 obliterate difference in our anxiety to establish 

 identity. The Law of Difference and the Law of 

 Definite Number not only provide for the move- 

 ment of Nature through the determinate steps of 

 the inorganic and the organic, but also for the 

 ascent by a specifically new element from the life- 

 less to the living, then from the plant to the ani- 

 mal, and finally from animal to man, with his 

 rational consciousness. The whole, to be sure, 

 must be developed through the single principle of 

 mechanism, but the now favourite doctrine of the 

 "persistence of force" violates the essential prin- 

 ciple that specific differences — primitive Types — 



^ That every occurrence must have a reason, and a reason sufficient 

 to explain it. 



2 That no subject can have contradictory predicates. 



