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REV. CHANCELLOR LIAS, M.A., ON 



Apply it to Matter, and again you are confronted with complex 

 substances whose various characteristics you must take into 

 account. Even the adjectives Objective and Subjective, so 

 often used by persons entirely unacquainted with their meaning, 

 were, I believe, originally used in precisely the opposite senses 

 to those which they now bear, so that what we now call Objective 

 meant what Subjective now means, and vice versa. Nor, so far 

 as I am aware, has any reason been given for preferring one form 

 of expression to the other. For a discussion of the ding an sick 

 I must refer the reader to what I have said in my 1883 paper, 

 on the attempt to reduce composite conceptions to abstract ones. 

 I might fill pages with the enumeration of the slovenliness and 

 ineptitude of Kant's metaphysics. The worst of them all is his 

 neglect of definitions, which deprives his philosophy, useful as 

 it is in the way of suggestion, of the title to belong to the 

 exact sciences.* 



To pass to other philosophers : the erratic treatment of the 

 first of all subjects is to be found in Fichte's representation of 

 Grod as the " moral order of the universe and nothing more,'" 

 and as " beyond origin and therefore non-existent, because 

 " existence implies origin.'' Schelling again says that the 

 " Unconditioned,'' by which he means God — a very large assump- 

 tion surely — " can be found neither in the subject nor the object, 

 but only in the Absolute Ich." This, he goes on to say, " is 

 conceived of because it is conceived of," and adds that His 

 existence is as incapable of being proved as our own.t This 

 reminds me of the story told of our own Browning, that when 

 asked what he meant by a certain passage, replied that when 

 it was written there were two who knew what it meant, the 

 Almighty and Robert Browning, but that now only God Almighty 

 knew. Hegel is famous for his supposed discovery that to be 

 and not to be are identical . But it is not generally known that 

 he was anticipated in this discovery by the Gnostic Basilides, 

 who lived early in the second century a.d., and taught that 

 "pure being was pure nothing."} I once (in 1856) met a 

 Prussian gentleman who corrected my ideas about Hegel's 

 teaching. " By identical," he said, " Hegel did not mean 



* If I mistaks not, Schiller, his friend and pupil, complained of his 

 carelessness in philosophical inquiry, 

 t For reference, see my 1883 paper. 



X He taught that God was absolute non-existence, because " all idea 

 of Being involved limitation." 



