148 ■ ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



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 accord- 

 ance 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 agree- 

 ment, 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 ( Vorstelbmg). 

 The derivation of mind from actiial matter is there- 

 fore 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.^ 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 Diihring, to explain con- 

 sciousness as a phenomenon arising from the earlier and more real 

 existence of the object, or "matter." 



