LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 141 



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 estabhshing 

 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 sub- 

 stance 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 Duhring'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 



